Five Days
by shiiki
Summary: Alone in enemy territory with only five days to live, Samm makes an unexpected ally and reaches some stunning conclusions about the fate of their two species. Alternate PoV of Part II of Partials.
1. Capture

**FIVE DAYS**

a _Partials_ fanfiction by _shiiki_

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 _Disclaimer: All characters, scenes, and canon dialogue belong to Dan Wells. I'm just playing in the sandbox!_

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CHAPTER ONE

Capture

 _Day 0_

The darkness was enclosing him, as thick and oppressive as the coal mines he'd once been in. Samm's lungs choked up as his mind struggled towards awareness. He was dimly aware of being pinned in place. _There was … an explosion_ , he thought. It must be the debris, heavy concrete from the fallen structures holding him in place.

There was a faint mumble of voices, sounding close by yet soft and distorted, as though his ears were full of cotton wool. He couldn't make out individual words or voices. Samm breathed in deeply but no data arrived. Where was everyone else? He reached out blindly and his armed, half-pinned by something solid, brushed against something warm and soft.

His eyes felt weighed down by the same heaviness across his entire body. It was closing back in, dragging him away from consciousness. Samm barely managed to lift one eyelid. He fixed on a pair of bright brown eyes before the world caved back in on him, and he sank into the darkness.

 _He was in the mines again, shovel in hand. Beams of light from hundreds of headlamps attacked the pitch black of the tunnels, but it always seemed to Samm that they never managed to push back the pervasive blackness._

 _Here in the mines, darkness had a life of its own. He wasn't scared of it exactly. There was just an uncomfortable constriction he felt every time he descended, like a noose hovering close to his neck that threatened to tighten the deeper he went._

 _Samm hated it. The thought repeated in his head many times every shift, reverberating along with his discomfort on the link. It intensified with the concurrent feelings of the other Partials on his mining team. They didn't share his aversion of the environment, but they all harboured their own versions of hatred, either for the work, its arbitrary assignment, or their treatment by the humans who had put them here. One of his team was an officer model, and he spewed a potent mix of anger and humiliation onto the link. Their shared sense felt like a ticking time bomb these days, helplessness and resentment building up into an incendiary combination that seeped through their breaths in the close confines of a mining tunnel. More and more, Samm felt like the air was heavy with its fuel, ready to explode._

 _Their shift ended at last and they shuffled into the mine elevator, emerging from the depths of the mountains into the cool Wyoming night. The suffocating hold on Samm slowly dissipated …_

He clawed himself out of dreams of coal mines and tried to focus on the present. The heaviness was lifting, but Samm's limbs remained pinned and a smoky veil seemed to hang over his mind. He forced his eyes open to take in his surroundings: he was in the centre of a small chamber, bound to a cold metal structure. There was a solitary feel to the room, but he wasn't alone. Fanning out in a circle by the walls were uniformed guards, at least ten of them, each one heavily armed and in a defensive stance.

 _Is this B Company headquarters?_

No, something was off with this assessment. Too many guards, several of whom did not appear to fit the soldier models. This last ruled out the likelihood that he'd been captured by any of the Partial factions, in fact, but Samm's mind resisted drawing the alternative conclusion. The implications were unthinkable.

He shifted his attention instead to the layout of the room. To his left, five chairs behind a long table; to his right, more chairs laid out in neat rows facing the five at the front. The door was on the opposite side of the chamber. It opened and four people were marched in by more armed guards, who took their places around the rim of the room once their chargers were seated. Samm eyed the four newcomers carefully. These did correspond vaguely with the soldier Partial models – three of them did, at least. The two males appeared to be infantrymen like him. One of the females fit the pilot moulds, small and compact. The last female was unplaceable: tall and wiry, brown-skinned with long, dark hair. She glanced at Samm, but quickly averted her gaze when she saw that he was scrutinising them.

He couldn't fathom why they were under guard along with him, though clearly they were being treated as less of an enemy. They were unchained, for one—Samm reassessed his own restraints and almost scoffed at the ludicrous amount of rope, straps, and even chains that had been wound around his body, locking him to his metal rig. He breathed in deeply, trying to take in their link data, but it was completely silent.

Another mystery: it wasn't just that everyone in the room was keeping their emotions carefully blank, which would have been odd enough in itself. There was a hollow emptiness to his link sense that he associated with being alone. If he hadn't opened his eyes, he wouldn't have known the others were in the room with him. For a moment he wondered if he was hallucinating the whole thing.

If so, it was an extremely detailed hallucination. Samm ran through other explanations in his head, each one wilder than the last: an invisible sort of gas mask, advanced biological shielding, interference with his own senses. Nothing really plausible suggested itself.

The door opened again and another small group entered, unguarded this time. Five of them took seats at the table; the others filed towards the back of the room, with the exception of one female, a leggy blonde, who seated herself next to the unplaceable dark-haired girl and began whispering to her.

There were too many variations, too many age ranges. He hadn't seen one in eleven years, but he remembered well enough that humans didn't have specific models – they came in all shapes and sizes. It was becoming harder to deny the humiliating conclusion that he had indeed been captured by humans.

The irony was not lost on him.

Samm tried to run through the intel in his head: the humans were gathered in communities on Long Island; they had some semblance of a military patrolling its North Shore, based off Queens, but it was weak and limited; no human was any match for a Partial. There were some drifters scattered about – they'd in fact been the real target of Samm's mission. He realised now that they must somehow have ran into an actual group of humans. They'd believed it to be a B Company faction, but given his situation now …

His entire predicament suggested that a lot of the intel was faulty. To begin with, the organised and unanticipated group of human military in Manhattan. Samm scanned the room again, wondering if it had involved any of the guards present. Secondly, they had been cunning enough to take out his squad in groups – the first rigged explosion cutting down half of them, then a second one set off when Samm's team had tried to get the drop on them. Samm's memory of this was more fuzzy; he knew they'd picked off one of the scouts, tracked down the main group and taken out the sentry. The explosion had come after they'd initiated a chase. Beyond that … well, he supposed that was when they'd got him.

Either way, it was clear that the humans were much more dangerous than the D Company generals had led Samm to believe.

'The hearing is now in session.' The tall, clean-shaven man had taken the middle seat at the table. He stood now, addressing the room but seeming unable to take his eyes off Samm. The four others on either side of him—two male, two female, all looking considerably older—were less fixated, but their eyes kept darting towards Samm as well: furtive glances that swept away as soon as their gazes locked. The man at the centre finally looked away to the humans in the front row. 'This hearing has been called for two reasons: the discipline of these four young adults, and the determination of what should be done with this—' his eyes darted back to Samm, '—Partial.'

That Samm wasn't dead like the rest of his squad was curious enough; they'd all been shooting to kill on site. He couldn't fathom what involvement he might have in a tribunal, let alone being party to a hearing for four other humans. The only circumstance he knew of that even involved a trial was within a Partial's own faction – getting court-martialled for disobedience or betrayal. Had he been captured by a different faction, it would have meant imprisonment to begin with; depending on which faction it was and how pliable his loyalties were, interrogation or execution could follow. In any case, the link would indicate what they intended to do with him.

Samm scrutinised the man carefully, searching for any data that might accompany his words, but he could feel nothing. Did humans perhaps have a shorter link range? Their senses were duller, that he knew; did their data not travel as far, too? He cursed the headache that was making it hard to think.

With no idea what to expect, Samm considered his circumstances. The fact that he was in a hearing seemed positive; that he was chained up and guarded less so, though it could be only an over-enthusiastic precaution. He thought of his mission; his link data would convey the bare facts of it: their search for a human drifter, their mistaken run-in with the human military. If they'd known the group was human, they'd surely have approached more carefully, possibly adjusted their strategy. Would his squad captain have considered a truce feasible? Samm couldn't be sure. He wondered if he could suggest one now. It had been eleven years since their species had clashed, enough time for animosity to die.

 _And we need them._

The trial proceedings passed along into familiar territory: a disciplinary hearing within the military. Samm was grimly satisfied to note that he had accurately pegged at least two of the four humans standing trial—it was the male and female who best fit the Partial moulds. The charges were unauthorised activity, though their juror didn't reveal directly what they'd actually done. He suspected it must be connected with the two others and himself; there was little justification for conducted a military hearing in their presence otherwise. The convoluted way humans did things was making his head spin.

The juror darted a furtive glance at Samm as he revealed, 'We can't spare many trained soldiers. Even criminals,' adding to Samm's bewilderment. It did confirm one piece of intel, though—the human military was limited.

 _Which still doesn't explain how they got the better of us._

The female was let off with a mere slap of the wrist: reassignment. The male, higher in their hierarchy, was dishonourably discharged—a more painful punishment. Nothing out of the ordinary so far, besides the fact that the decisions had apparently been made in a private military tribunal. Why deal with it again in this hearing? Samm eyed the two human soldiers. He was intrigued to see tears streaming down the girl's face as she accepted her light sentence. It was an incongruously extreme display of emotion. Her fellow human—the dark-haired girl—touched her knee, and in turn whispered to the discharged officer.

 _She's a civilian,_ noted Samm, though this gave him no extra information. There was no such rank in Partial society, where every individual was military.

The civilian hearing proceeded, beginning immediately with the military girl countering a dismissal order. Samm linked amazement, both at her temerity and ability to refuse—and especially the way the humans just accepted it.

The first civilian charge continued as an odd exchange between the centre juror and the man in the group—apparently the oldest of the four, at twenty-two. _Two years older than the oldest of us_ —the thought crept chillingly into Samm's mind and he pushed it away, hoping it hadn't linked obviously. It struck him as a piece of information he should be holding back. He didn't know if the humans were receiving his link data; just because they weren't broadcasting very far didn't mean they couldn't link him.

The twenty-two-year-old broke into an impassioned speech: 'I was eleven years old in the Break—I watched my father die in a Partial attack. I watched my mom and my brothers die two weeks later in a high school gym packed so full of refugees that RM went through it like a brush fire.'

Samm tried to ignore the twist in his gut as this eloquent verbal picture churned up the faint memory of watching the humans die in the plague eleven years ago, the Partials just as helpless to reverse it. It was the chronic guilt that could not be assuaged: responsibility for an unintended consequence in their war for freedom. All their research after had never uncovered how they had unwittingly committed mass genocide.

The man finished his speech dramatically, cleverly diffusing the responsibility of age that was undoubtedly intended to fall on his head. Samm had to hand it to him; the human was quite tactically sound. Attention shifted to the last member of the group as she got to her feet, threw her head back, and proclaimed herself fully cognisant of the risks and consequences of her actions. She was, thought Samm, quite a dramatic specimen, remembering her various actions before, too.

'What were you planning to do with this Partial once you caught it?'

The words hit Samm solidly in the face. Even flat and emotionless as they were, unaccompanied by link data, they made his mind reel with the implications. Though he had been vaguely putting two and two together—the numbers of the group adding up, his fate in conjunction with the trial of these four—he'd still favoured the explanation of a human military strike force taking out his squad and captured him. That picture crumbled now, leaving him in disbelieving shame.

 _Two untrained civilians survived a fight with my squad—killing everyone except me—and captured me alive?_

Information was coming in fast now, with all the implications behind each statement. Samm struggled to concentrate on what it meant: comments about containment, contamination … the civilian girl turned to him then and he got a good look at her face. He felt a jolt as their eyes met and he recognised their bright brown—the exact ones he recalled from a single lucid moment before waking up in the chamber. He knew without a doubt then that she had been complicit in his capture, one of those responsible for killing his squad.

And then she said, 'I was going to cut off its hand and test it in the field with a medicomp we brought to Brooklyn.'

 _She was going to_ what _?!_ If the earlier realisation that his captors were unsanctioned youths working independently had been a sledgehammer to the head, this revelation was a bomb exploding in his face. Samm recoiled automatically. This innocent-looking human girl was calmly relaying her intention to dismember him, with no concern for his dignity. In her mind, he was an experimental subject, not a living being deserving of respect. The cruelty of it threw him violently back to a memory of his life before the revolution. The resentment he'd felt at the regular disdain from his old mine supervisor, who had always treated his Partial workers as no more than machines deployed in his incapable hands, surged to the forefront of his data. It fuelled his outrage in an incendiary combination of emotions.

His hatred exploded out over the link, so intense and ferocious he imaged the whole chamber must be awash in it. Any Partial would have halted uncomfortably with that much emotion directed at them. The humans remained unaffected, however. They continued to discuss the transgressions of Samm's would-be butcher—all in terms of the risk to human life, of course. It seemed to him a cold, cost-analysis approach, loudly debated in terms of a mystifying rubric of protecting pregnancies and breeding capabilities.

His presence at the hearing, Samm realised, had nothing to do with his being on trial. They regarded him as only tangentially related, a piece of evidence of the actual criminals' wrongdoing. _In eleven years_ , Samm thought bitterly, _nothing has changed._ His brief considerations of negotiating a truce fled, shattered by the force of his anger.

So incensed was he, Samm could barely follow the ensuing exchange between the humans as they argued in an extravagantly dramatic fashion. The content of their debate barely made an impression on him—he vaguely registered the subject of RM being brought up as justification—until the discussion circled round to him specifically.

'Well, you have the floor now. What do you want to say?' Gimlet eyes bore into him coldly. Samm stared back silently, letting his linked rage speak for him.

'Why were you in Manhattan?' asked a weathered-looking woman. 'You were part of an armed strike team making a temporary camp only miles from our border. What was your mission?'

Samm focused on his anger, giving them nothing but cold hatred as the woman prodded him with more questions.

'Just kill it,' said another juror. 'We should never have brought it here to begin with.'

'Study it!' The girl leapt to her feet, her whole body trembling. 'Going out on our own was dumb, and there's a million ways it could have gone wrong, and probably a million ways it could still go wrong, but look at what we've got: a live Partial, right there, just waiting to be studied.' She gestured wildly at Samm; her voice rose and fell with passionate inflection as she continued. 'Punish us if you want – kill us if you want us killed – but somebody, please take advantage of this opportunity and study it. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong – that's okay, the damage has already been done. But if I'm right, we can cure RM and finally start putting our society back together again.'

 _I could have told you it's useless,_ Samm seethed silently. _We've studied it just as long, and with more advanced technology, and we still don't know why or how it happened. You could have asked, but you never even considered it, did you? You just think of us as things you can cut up to perform some insane medical experiment … for what, to satisfy your perverse curiosity?_ It wasn't even like the humans _needed_ to cure RM—everyone still alive had to be immune: they needed no inoculation, surely immunity sufficed as a cure? They had no guilt to assuage, no reason to mire themselves in a plague of eleven years past.

 _Do they?_ The question hovered under the inferno in his mind, as the girl finished her impassioned speech and the room fell into silence, broken only by the whispered conference of the jury. The reasoning for the girl's obsession with RM had been hinted at during the course of the trial; Samm just hadn't attended much to it. He was hardly in the mood to accept a justification for her high-handed decisions, anyway.

Minutes passed; at last, the jury rose to deliver a verdict. 'The Senate has reached a decision. We have become convinced of the necessity for study: The Partials are immune to RM, and if we can discover the secrets behind that immunity, we may finally be able to find a cure. This Partial's body may be the key to our survival, and it doesn't appear to present any immediate threat when restrained and sedated.'

The last word pierced through the red-hot fog in his mind. _That explains the headache … and why I'm finding it hard to focus._

'We are moving the Partial to a secure facility in the hospital, confidentially and under guard, where it may be studied and analysed in detail. After five days, it will be dismantled and disposed of.'

The cruelty of these words slammed into him, another anvil bludgeoning him in the head. Not the fact that they intended to kill him eventually—that wouldn't have been surprising even among Partials—but the attitude towards it. The baldness of the words stabbed him keenly: eleven years later, and they were still inferior to the humans, no more than a synthesised weapon to be disposed of.

Samm's thoughts dissolved into an age-old cry of despair: _You created me. You gave me thoughts and feelings and yet I'm just a piece of equipment to you._

His rage and pain fanned out on the link as they rolled the entire block of steel he was tied to out of the room. But though he breathed out his hurt, the link stayed painfully detached.


	2. Study

**FIVE DAYS**

a _Partials_ fanfiction by _shiiki_

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CHAPTER 2

Study

 _Day 1_

The humans rolled Samm's metal prison down long, dark hallways, finally coming to a stop in a room that smelled of rot and mildew. The light was dim, but Samm's eyesight adjusted quickly. His throbbing headache had started to fade away, but the return of clarity was no boon, as his mind quickly envisioned for him the human's next step.

They were going to interrogate him.

Fear flared through him. He'd been interrogated once before, when he'd first arrived at D Company, but that hardly counted, because they'd linked his friendly intentions easily enough and accepted him into the community. That wasn't about to happen now.

A bright beam shone straight into his eyes, momentarily blinding him. When his pupils re-adjusted to the intensity, he found himself staring at a stocky black man who stood, arms crossed, surveying Samm.

Samm held his breath, not wanting to communicate his fear.

'What was your purpose in Manhattan, Partial?' barked the man. When Samm didn't answer, he stepped closer, leaning aggressively towards Samm. 'You see these soldiers, Partial? The Senate may have voted to prolong your execution, but your five days' grace will be a long, torturous one if you don't comply.'

Samm wasn't actually certain if the answers to these questions were actually military secrets, but he was reluctant to give anything to the humans. At best, it would only incense them enough to kill him sooner. At worse … There was a fragile stalemate between their species now. Much as he felt like killing them all in this moment, the Partials couldn't afford to—not until they extracted the secret behind expiration from the humans.

He registered the movement a split second before the blow caught him in the side of his head. It made him expel his breath and all his data—PAIN FEAR RAGE—along with the bare bones of his thoughts—MISSION SECRET HOLD BACK.

Another furious blow, along with the question, 'What was your mission?'

Alarmed by the references that had slipped out on the link, Samm tried again to pull back his data, though he knew it would be futile. Even under ideal circumstances, his capacity for holding his breath was at best ten minutes. Against the barrage that rained down upon him now, Samm couldn't help gasping in pain. His body strained against the chains with each blow, instinctively searching for an escape.

PAIN—CAN'T DEFEND—FAILURE—

A pause, punctuated by another question: 'What are the Partials planning?'

He tried to focus on the physical pain—emotional data that wouldn't convey any intelligent information—but his mind worked against him, wanting escape from the aversive experience. The information that did leak out in jumbled pieces—SECRET DYING HUMANS—seemed to infuriate the humans, either from the content or their disbelief. Again and again, they repeated their questions in different variations, accompanied by blows to his head and lashes to his body. It seemed to reach a level where they no longer expected answers, where the violence exacted on him seemed to sate something more than a simple need for answers. Samm's ears rang and his eyes watered from the relentless attack. He was breathing hard now, and he registered dimly that he still wasn't reading any data.

This fragment of thought snagged in his mind, a piece of a puzzle that struggled to fit with other aspects of the whole situation. But Samm's thoughts danced away on waves of pain when he tried to focus them.

At last, it ceased. Samm's every muscle ached from the pummelling. His face felt puffy. His cheeks were wet. A metallic tang hung distastefully in his mouth. Through slitted eyes, he noticed a newcomer to the room, a white-haired man he recognised from the earlier hearing.

'Doctor,' said the black man in acknowledgement.

'Is it sedated?'

'No—we wanted it lucid for the interrogation. Not that it's done any good. Not a peep out of it.' The discrepancy of this comment with the data he had linked under torture confused Samm. Something almost clicked into place in his mind, a connection just beyond his reach.

The black man glanced darkly at Samm. 'May you and Walker have better luck. I still can't comprehend why you think this arrangement is worth the compromise in security.'

The doctor didn't reply. He came forward and stared at Samm for a long moment, taking in his battered state.

 _Nothing on the link_ , thought Samm. _Still nothing. Where is their data? Are they even on the link?_

It came to him then, a forgotten nugget from his tactical training before the Isolation War. Partials linked to give them an advantage over the soldiers they faced. Over the _human_ soldiers.

Humans simply _didn't_ link.

Which meant that all of his linked emotions, all of his thoughts … they weren't receiving them at all. They hadn't beaten him because of their fury at his answers or repeated their questions because they thought he was lying. He hadn't answered any of their questions at all!

'I'll need to sedate it,' said the doctor finally. 'You'll need to clean and weigh it before we move it to the old quarantine room. I've had the custodians preparing it, and Weist is having his people working on reinforcements.'

He produced a syringe and jabbed it expertly into the crook of Samm's arm. The sedatives flowed into Samm's bloodstream, taking quick effect. Before Samm could elaborate on his mental realisation, consciousness descended like a fog. The last thing he was aware of was the rusty scent of his own blood.

 _The stench of blood and bodily fluids hung in the air._

 _The ward was a cesspool of death. It was the last one remaining in the hospital with live patients, although Samm knew it was only a matter of time before this one, too, went silent._

 _He wasn't sure why he had returned. The rest of his regiment had given up days ago, when it became clear that nothing they did was helping—not even their efforts to make the dying humans more comfortable._

 _RM ate the humans alive, inflaming their immune systems until they boiled in their own fevers. Within three days of infection, they were dead._

 _The other Partials had retreated to base camp in the heart of the city, unable to bear the helplessness and guilt that only intensified when they were all linking their response to the horror. By all accounts, Atlanta had been healthy before they'd taken it. Days after their invasion, the human resistance had crumbled as RM swept the city, and now, a week later, it was a ghost town. The last of its human population lay in this hospital ward, burning themselves away._

 _The plague was so perfectly timed, so coincidental that even knowing that they had not released a biological weapon, the whole regiment couldn't shake the sense that they were nevertheless culpable._

 _A wail caught Samm's attention. In the corner of the room, a woman lay dead. The baby cradled in her stiff arms was crying lustily however, a piteous scream of agony that cut straight to Samm's heart. Its face was red with both effort and disease._

 _Samm wondered again why he'd come. This was almost too much to bear. Still he stayed, a silent witness to the final passing of the last humans in Atlanta, until the cries subsided and the last breaths expired, leaving a hollow, empty quiet._

Samm awoke in the quiet, the remnants of sorrow from his dream floating in his senses. For the first time since his capture, his mind felt sharp and clear. The sedatives they'd pumped into him must finally have worn off.

He was still strapped down, this time to what appeared to be an operating table. The humans had stripped him to his underwear; he lay in this undignified position, facing the ceiling. Cameras winked at him from the corners of the room. Clearly he was being watched, even if no guards had been left with him. He tested the restraints: strong, leaving him no more than a few inches of movement against them.

Somebody had left food next to his cheek. It was an awkward angle, but his mouth could just manage to reach it if he craned his head. Samm bit into the stale bread, not bothering to worry if it was safe. The humans had already plenty of other opportunities to kill him. The chances that they'd resort to poison were minute.

Besides, he was hungry. His last meal had been before the mission … how long ago now?

The faint light filtering through the window on the far side of the room told him it was early morning, but he didn't know how many days it had been since the ambush in Manhattan. He guessed it was the first of his five remaining days. If the humans had meant to sedate him throughout their study, they would have simply killed him at the end of it and not left him to awaken to food.

Samm polished off the bread and then took in the rest of his surroundings. Tables lined the walls, stacked with equipment: computers, screens, others he couldn't name but appeared to be medical. The room was more brightly lit than any he'd seen here so far, but it still didn't come close to the lighting they had in Greenwich.

 _This is it, then_ , he thought. _Their 'lab'_. He felt like an insect, mounted on a drawing board ripe for study. A shiver came over him that had nothing to do with the cold metal beneath his bare skin.

There was a soft hum, followed by a whoosh of air, and the door clicked open. Samm recognised the dark-skinned girl who entered slowly: she'd been at the hearing. The one who had fought so hard to study him.

The one who had intended to cut off his hand.

The memory of it, tinged with linked fear and anger, made his heart pound. Was she about to do it now? What else had she said? He wished now that he had paid better attention, to give himself an idea of what was in store for him now. He probably would have, if they hadn't drugged him up to high heaven.

He pulled forth bits and pieces—a cavalier attitude towards his person, an obsession with RM, an insistence that he be studied. She'd been the one pushing hardest to keep him alive for that purpose. Well, she'd got her way: she was here, now.

And yet, surprisingly, she didn't start. She walked first to one of the tables. Samm could hear her moving things around on it. She turned, and still her attention was drawn to the room around them. Her gaze travelled towards the cameras in the corners, her breath came out in a loud puff, then she approached his table at last, only to pass right by him. He watched her stop at the window and stare out of it.

None of it made any sense. She was here to study him, so why didn't she … study? Why move around the room so randomly, making all these awkward actions: rubbing her hands together, touching her hair, her face, her ears … the continuous action reminded him a little of Heron, whose manner was unlike any other Partial. Were they naturally like the spy models, theses humans? Or more likely, it was the spy models that more closely resembled the humans. Heron was the only espionage rank Partial he knew, and he'd been out of contact with humans for so long that he couldn't be sure.

At last, the girl came closer to look at him. Her eyes were the exact same colour as his, except their almond shape, nestled in a soft, winsome face, gave them a much more attractive quality. Her face changed as she examined him: contours and shades shifting so subtly he wouldn't have detected it if he hadn't been this close. He couldn't tell what it meant, if it even meant anything. Samm breathed in deeply before recalling sharply that it was useless. Humans had no link, no data he could read to anticipate their next move. Nothing but frustrating, indecipherable actions.

And yet, he imagined he sensed something there, a whiff of almost-connection. Samm blinked and it disappeared, a trick of his mind. He'd been bereft of link data for at least a day now. His senses, hollow from the lack, must be over-actively searching for any possible connection.

The movement of a hand caught his eye; the girl was reaching towards his face. As she did so, her teeth flashed and caught her bottom lip between them, an action that sent a fresh wave of fear flooding through him. Was it a predatory sign? He braced himself, but her hand stopped en route and fell back to her side.

'I take it they beat you,' she said.

It was a cold, cavalier statement, reducing his long night of torture to a stated fact. She knew how he'd spent his night, and under her hands, his day was likely about to get worse. And this teasing, her interminable slowness at carrying out her purpose, was unnerving. She reached out again, and with his nerves keyed to the highest pitch, Samm couldn't stay still. He jerked away reflexively to avoid her touch, but his restraints held tight.

Surprisingly, she leapt back. Her hands flew to a holster at her side, but it was a few seconds before they retrieved the gun. A lesser soldier would have drawn it in a split second. Was she incompetent with firearms?

'I was part of the group that captured you.' _So not untrained, clearly_ , he thought. Unless she was lying. 'I'm not trying to threaten you, I'm just telling you how serious I am. We've got five days together, and if you want to spend them fighting, I'm more than ready.'

He studied her, trying to work out what she meant. Her stance was aggressive; her words contradictory. She didn't wish to threaten, but she'd drawn a weapon on a bound prisoner. She implied that he'd fought her, which was ludicrous. He was strapped down and at her mercy. Even without the gun, she had all the power.

The girl stepped back again, then lowered and stowed her gun. 'In case you couldn't tell, everyone here is pretty much terrified of you. We don't know what you can do or how you work. For all we know, you're a biological weapon on legs.'

She was trying to communicate not just facts, he realised, but information that was usually passed along the link. Without it, everything had to be verbal. It was nevertheless an annoying method of interaction, a deluge of words devoid of the typical emotion that accompanied them.

Another hand gesture redirected his attention back to the girl. This time, it was a half wave in his direction, following by a loud release of breath before she continued speaking.

'Fine then, if you don't want to talk, that's fine. I don't think I would be in your situation either, frankly, but then again, I don't know if I could help myself. Humans are very social creatures …'

It seemed like she would continue unless he responded—which would have to be verbally, too, since she couldn't receive his link. Though the first thing that came to mind now was irritation at the incessant flow of chatter. Samm opened his mouth and rasped, 'You talk too much.' The air felt like fire pushing through his lungs; he was in worse shape than he thought.

The girl stopped midsentence, her mouth gaping open at him. There was silence for half a minute, then she started up again.

'Point taken.' Her voice had a different timbre to it suddenly, a lighter quality. 'But first, let me explain …'

He closed his eyes wearily as her words turned ominously towards medical terminology. It must mean that she was warming up to begin at last.

'Let me at least warn you,' she said, 'this finger poker is going to hurt a bit—it's nothing horrible, just a spring-loaded pin about two millimetres long. Are you going to let me use your finger, or are we going to fight again?'

His _finger_? Surely that couldn't be what she wanted. He opened her eyes to see that she wasn't lying: the finger poker was exactly as she had described, grasped firmly and innocently in her hand. He wasn't sure what she'd meant by a fight, and the fact that she was practically asking him, and politely, as though he had a right to refuse, was perplexing in itself. It was a level of decency he had not been expecting, not after everything … He wasn't even sure he wanted it, from this human he hated, who was partly responsible for the death of his unit and his capture, who had spoken so cavalierly before about chopping his hand off.

But he stretched his hand open to give her access to his finger.

'Thank you,' she said, surprising him yet again. There was something soothing to the sensation that accompanied it. A balm over the wounds from her callous words the previous day. _You matter_ , her thanks said. _You deserve respect_. His breath caught painfully in his throat as the unexpected emotion threatened to undo him.

True to her word, the pinprick hurt, but almost imperceptibly. It was embarrassing that he even flinched at such a tiny jab. She pressed a tiny vial to the wound and they watched his blood trickle slowly into the tube. It managed to fill half of it before his platelets took over, knitting the prick site closed.

'Your blood pressure must be low,' the girl commented as she removed the vial. 'Usually I can fill two vials with one finger. Unless …' She looked from tube to finger, evidently just making the connection. She voiced her amazement as she studied the tube more closely, and then fell silent, looking at him and back to his blood again. It fit with what she'd said before—she really didn't know much, if anything, about Partial physiology at all. _Why_ she didn't was the mystery, as it seemed unlikely that she would have embarked on this study without collating existing information from the other humans. Though she'd implied that humans as a whole _didn't_ actually know much about them any more.

Humans as a whole meaning the tiny fraction of the once-burgeoning population. It occurred to Samm then that their human creators could well have died without passing on their knowledge. With that came the chilling thought: _Is our mission futile, then? If the humans don't have the answers …_

There was an ironic caveat to that conclusion. There was another way to get answers. A direct flip of his current situation, with humans on the receiving end. A part of him wondered, with no small amount of horror, if that had been in the D Company leaders' plans all along.

The girl was studying him intensely again, some deep thought clearly running through her head, but without the link, Samm couldn't even being to fathom what it was. She'd just expressed astonishment at how quickly he'd healed over. That she was surprised by how quickly he healed, he was certain. Was she planning to follow up on this discovery? Would she hurt him now, given an opportunity to test his defences? It was the logical move to perform on a test subject, but he felt his stomach twist at the thought. If she were to do exactly what he'd imagined she meant to now, after she'd spoken to him as an equal, it was going to hurt ten times as much as if she'd simply walked in at the beginning and stabbed him without a word.

'I'm not going to torture you,' she said finally, 'but I do have to get another blood sample.' She worked on another tube as she continued to explain the intricacies of his blood—she knew _something_ about that at least—and drew out the finger poker again. 'Get ready for another poke.'

Knowing what to expect this time, he could remain still as she drew the sample. Once she removed it, she expertly taped a cotton ball to his finger—a useless move, but one that mollified Samm. She'd treated him like a human, even having just witnessed his inhuman healing capabilities. Her eyes met his again, then looked away quickly, but he sensed it was different from the previous times she had averted her gaze. There was some kind of emotion involved, but he could only guess at it. Regret? Embarrassment?

She retreated with her vials of his blood, without a comment this time, and proceeded to the tables. The computers and screens were too far away and at too awkward an angle for Samm to see what she was up to there – not that he would have understood the analysis – so he stared up at the ceiling as she worked, the beeps and chirps of the equipment and the faint murmurs of her voice as she muttered to herself, forming a backdrop to his thoughts.

She was studying RM, he recalled, as he caught some of her faint exclamations and connected it with his vague memories from the trial. The humans were trying to understand it, to find a cure. They—no, _she_ —had been shouting about saving their children, not that any of the others had disputed it.

The answer swooped down upon him in a staggering revelation: RM killed all the human babies. Every child in the past eleven years had died.

It disconfirmed eleven years of Partial intelligence reports about the Long Island human population. None of their scouts had ever reported any anomalies—the humans were settling down, scavenging supplies, organising military defence, growing food; their numbers were small but varied, the disease having left a sizeable gene pool intact. Now that he thought about it, there had never been any mention of human children about, though that wasn't something any of them would have flagged as extraordinary—the concept of children was alien to Partials. Even before the revolution, Samm's exposure to them had been minimal. An image from his dream, with the dying infant, resurfaced. Yes, humans reproduced and their young grew. How could he have forgotten?

It appeared now that RM immunity was not hereditary, that the humans had all along been facing an expiration date of their own, though in their case it was more species- rather than individual-focused. _Of course, the individual problem of expiration is equivalent to a species-wide one. We can't make any new Partials. Especially not if it's true that the humans who made us are really dead._ All the same, it was an issue that gave the dynamics of the whole situation a greater complexity than he could wrap his head around.

'You made pretty damn sure we couldn't get away from this thing, didn't you?' Samm turned to see the girl glaring at him. Her words had been forceful, delivered at a higher amplitude. It reflected … anger?

More pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It was perhaps no wonder eleven years hadn't tempered the humans' animosity towards Partials—they believed the disease had come from Partials, and the disease was killing them yet.

'You can't reproduce,' he said, verbalising his theory. 'That's why you're trying to cure RM. We don't have children, so their absence didn't seem odd at first, but you don't have any, do you? You're trying to cure RM because your children don't survive it.'

She didn't answer immediately. Her face went through a dizzying array of changes again. When she finally spoke, her words were cutting.

'You, Partial. What do you know about RM?'

He recoiled at the contemptuous way she addressed him, so different from the previous courtesy she had afforded him. Samm felt a mixture of petulance and caution. She'd had him for at least an hour and it was the first time she'd thought to ask directly for his input. The condescension chafed at him, while her reversion to hostility gave him pause. If he admitted what he did know—that years of Partial study had turned up no profitable line of inquiry—would she in accept this and concede failure? He suspected she wouldn't.

But there were others listening in, too, Samm remembered suddenly. They were more likely to take Samm's answer as an indication that the study was useless and he, the Partial, should be killed immediately.

 _No, I need more time to figure this out._ There were things he had to work out, which hinted at the solution he'd set out to find.

'Oh, come on, are we going to go through this again?' The girl reverted back to a conversational sentence structure, dropping her imperative tone so quickly it could give him whiplash. 'Can't you at least say something?'

'Well,' Samm considered his words carefully. 'Human,' he addressed her directly. 'You're going to kill me in five days. I don't see much of an incentive to say anything.'

She responded with more drama than he had expected: flinging herself across the room into a chair, wiping her hands across her face, moving about … all accompanied by rapid facial movements. Samm felt certain he had discomfited her, and it gave him some small satisfaction, however petty. At last, she settled back at her table with the computers and screens and the room returned to its previous electronic hum.

With the bigger picture now in view, Samm started to feel his hatred ebb away on waves of empathy. The similarity of their situations—Partials and humans—presented itself clearly. Both species faced impending extinction and the accompanying desperation to cure it. Put in that light, even his capture, torture and examination was understandable.

He wasn't blind to the hypocrisy of his feelings in the matter. For all his resentment at the way the humans regarded him, Samm couldn't deny that the Partials' motives with respect to the humans were all that different.

 _If we didn't manage to get answers from a human under questioning, we'd resort to studying them like this, too._

And he had to admit, despite her talk of mutilation at the hearing, the girl hadn't attempted anything of the sort. She'd even treated him with consideration. Humanely. He watched her for a moment, now engrossed in one of the screens on the table. She was young, no more than seventeen. It struck him that she must possess an enormous amount of courage. She'd ventured into no-man's land without the backing of her leaders, with the express intent of capturing a highly dangerous enemy, who in all likelihood would kill her first. With this in mind, he allowed that her manner during the trial might have been a show of bravado.

He'd believed, too, that the girl had turned to secure experimentation as a first line of inquiry because she didn't see him as an equal being, capable of reasonable exchange. This new perspective suggested fear as a motivation: a view of him as a dangerous enemy who hated them in return.

This fit with the ferocity of his interrogators, how they had attacked him as though seeking vengeance. When the Partials had revolted, their resentment had been fuelled by several years of suffering. The humans had faced their extinction via RM for eleven years, and if they believed that the Partials had been responsible for the plague …

 _But we didn't create it_. There had been no reason to, not when they had overthrown most of the government within months, not when it was all practically under their control. _We were winning the war._

'What?' The girl, roused from her work, turned to him, and he realised he must have spoken aloud. 'Why the hell are you bringing that up?'

'Because you think we created the virus.' This one mistaken belief explained more than just the human's on-going hatred of Partials, he realised. It underscored their conviction that he held the answers they were desperate for. 'That's why you're studying me as part of your mission to cure it. You think we engineered it; we didn't.'

'Obviously I expect you to lie to me, but I was hoping you'd be a little more creative.'

He supposed it wouldn't be that easy to convince her. Unlike them, the humans weren't motivated to relieve the Partials of their culpability. 'It's the truth.'

Her voice rose in amplitude again, a change he decided must be associated with anger. 'It is not true!' Her arms swung up away from her sides. 'You attacked us, you killed us, and you released that virus to finish the job.'

 _She needs to believe we did,_ he realised. Probably because … if she accepted his words as truth, she would realise the answers she was searching for, that the risks she had taken were all in vain.

'We were winning the war,' Samm repeated, wondering if the logic would be enough to convince her when she was so invested in believing he held the answers. He laid out the military reasoning for her: the dominance of their rebellion, the pure waste of losing the humans who had created and maintained their whole society.

'Was that your plan?' she interrupted. 'To use us as slaves? As labour to maintain your infrastructure?'

Irritation surged through his link. 'You mean the same thing you had done to us?'

He was beginning to place her reactions better. This time, when she moved away stiffly and threw something into the corner of the room, he identified her petulance without difficulty.

'We didn't want to enslave you,' he told her. The rebellion had never been about turning the tables on the humans, but freeing themselves from oppression. But maybe she wasn't in any state to accept that yet. He tried a different tack. 'Even if we did, we didn't want or need to kill you to do it. There was no purpose, tactical or political or otherwise, in releasing a killer virus.'

'You expect me to believe that a perfect supervirus, which destroyed humans and left you unscathed, was coincidentally released in the middle of your attack—and that you had nothing at all to do with it?'

She'd hit him back with the one fact that had haunted the Partials for years. The timing and the effects of RM, so perfectly aligned to favour Partials over humans had left them with a profound, unsettled guilt that somehow, despite never having planned it, they'd been responsible. Could he blame the humans for not believing their innocence?

'I admit that it seems far-fetched.'

'Far-fetched is an understatement.'

'We've been searching for an explanation ever since, but we still don't know where it came from.'

She shook her head, still unconvinced. 'I don't know why I am even talking to you.'

Just when he thought he had her figured out, she threw him for a loop. He hadn't initiated the conversation, yet she was acting as though he'd drawn her into it. Her mental twists and turns were too erratic for him to follow. She was back to pacing the room, turning her head back and forth from him to the computers. She settled back into her chair, but even then couldn't stop swivelling it in half circles. At last she seemed to reach a conclusion and settled on facing him.

'All right, since you're in such a talkative mood.' Her eyes locked on him. 'Why were you in Manhattan?'

She'd managed to go from their discussion of RM and the revolution to the part of the problem he hadn't managed to analyse properly yet. Intuition told him they were treading into dangerous waters—this was the answer they'd tried to beat out of him last night. He became acutely aware of the cameras again, certain that if ever the other humans, the ones in charge, were listening in, it would be now. Had they tasked the girl to question him?

'What was your mission? Why were you so close to our border?'

Samm met her clear, searching gaze. For some reason, he felt compelled to respond, even if he couldn't reveal anything.

'I can't tell you.'

Her innocence revealed itself in her next, guileless question: 'Why not?'

It conveyed an expectation of harmlessness, an assumption that if he revealed his secrets, the humans' angry retribution would not fall swiftly and irreversibly. Samm looked away from her, wondering if she truly believed that.

'Because,' he said slowly, wondering how best to convey to her that whatever he said was bound to have immediate consequences, 'I don't want them to kill me.'

'Why would they …' She fell silent, the implications of what he'd said evidently sinking in. 'I don't understand,' she said at last, speaking as much to herself as to him. 'They gave us—they gave me five days.'

Samm held his tongue, avoiding looking back at her, though he could sense her still staring at him. Eventually she gave up and returned to her work. For the rest of the day, she busied herself at the computers, either avoiding him due to their last exchange or simply not needing to examine him further. The latter seemed unusual, since her task was ostensibly to study him for answers. Taking a blood sample and then periodically ignoring him didn't seem to tally with his idea of 'study' … surely there wasn't that much in his blood that could sustain her interest for so long?

On the bright side, it really didn't seem as though her study was meant to be invasive or torturous.

 _Just like she said._

She was interrupted around midday by the white-haired doctor, who arrived bearing a plate of food.

'It's not for you,' he said. 'You can go to the cafeteria. I'll feed the Partial and review your notes while you're gone.'

The girl stood, blinking bemusedly at the plate … as though she had forgotten food existed, thought Samm. Amusement crept up on him, along with some satisfaction that he was starting to make some sense of the girls' nonverbal expressions. She looked up and stammered, 'I hadn't written out a report yet.'

The doctor surveyed her with what must be disapproval, and she quickly added, 'I meant to do a comprehensive report at the end of the day, you know, when I'd analysed everything. But I'll type something out now, just give me half an hour, and I'll come get you when I'm done. And I'll, um—' she grabbed the plate and glanced at Samm, 'feed it.'

'No need.' The doctor's tone sounded sour. He looked up at the cameras, then turned and left without clarifying which part of her sentence he was referring to.

The girl stared down at the plate she was holding and then back at Samm again. 'Um …' She approached him slowly, with a rosy tint to her brown cheeks. Samm didn't need the link to recognise her embarrassment. It was mirrored in him as she awkwardly held the small roll of bread for him to bite into. He devoured it quickly, not wanting to prolong the experience.

'Sorry about that,' she muttered quickly, turning away.

She typed rapidly for the next fifteen minutes, finishing off the report she had promised in half the time. The doctor reappeared soon, taking over her spot and settling in to read her work without bothering to look at Samm. When the girl returned half an hour later, Samm listened intently, curious to know what she had written, but the doctor only said, 'Leave the full report when you leave tonight.'

The girl worked late into the night. She ate her dinner out of a container she'd brought with her from the cafeteria before, clearly too engrossed to leave again, although she remembered his presence and they went through the same silent, awkward feeding procedure. She'd brought him something that tasted nutty and good this time, which was at least a nice change from the stale bread.

When she finally got up, long after the natural light outside the window faded, her movements were slow and fatigued. She nodded in his direction, and then she left.

The first day of study was over. He had only four more.


	3. Ally

**Five Days**

a _Partials_ fanfiction by _shiiki_

* * *

CHAPTER THREE

Ally

 _Day 2_

The other humans returned in the night: the white-haired doctor and the grim black man, flanked by several uniformed soldiers. They were midway in a conversation as they entered.

'—anything useful?' said the black man.

'Only a preliminary analysis,' said the doctor as he started up the computer. 'Bloodwork was clean of RM. Whatever immunity they have kicks it out of their system entirely.' He peered at the screen. 'Some speculation about its accelerated healing, but that's a long shot.' The doctor looked speculatively at Samm.

'So nothing to show for today.'

'Research is a slow process, Mkele.'

'The city won't wait, Skousen. As you well know. The last Voice attack left people up in arms. They're questioning whether the Hope Act was the right way to deal with RM. And knowing that we're hiding something is only fuelling the flames.' The black man—Mkele—surveyed Samm. 'Research is your way of getting information. My job, distasteful as it may be, is to explore other methods. If we get the answers we need now, we can save ourselves four days of riots waiting to happen.'

The doctor—Skousen—closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, his lips tightened into a thin line and he wheeled out a chest of drawers from under the table. 'It may be that its cell regeneration was too rapid for your … _methods_ last night to be effective. Torture is moot if the subject doesn't feel any pain.'

Samm felt a thrill of horror as light glinted off a blade that Skousen extracted from the drawer. Its sharp end gleamed as one of the soldiers took it by the handle.

'Do what you must,' said the doctor, and he left the room.

'Well, Partial,' said Mkele. 'We need answers. You're going to die either way. The only difference is whether you spend your last days in pain.'

Terror gripped Samm as the soldiers equipped themselves and rounded on him. A voice at the back of his head reminded him, however, _Actually, the difference is whether you get what you're looking for and kill me now._

'What was your mission in Manhattan?'

The tip of a blade pressed threateningly against the skin of his arm. Samm held his tongue despite his fear. Answering would serve no purpose except to hasten his own execution. The blade dug in, making Samm shudder and grit his teeth against the pain.

'What are the Partials plotting?'

Again, a stab of a knife, the twist of a blade.

'Does it have something to do with RM?'

With each refusal to answer, a new cut, each deeper than the last. Samm's breath left him in hisses of pain.

'Are they planning an attack? A release of an advanced version of RM?' Mkele was getting more inventive with his questions tonight, possibly as a result of his observations during the day. Samm could have answered this last one quite safely, but if he did, they might draw their conclusions from which questions he answered and which he didn't. He held his silence.

It went on … Samm wouldn't answer, but eventually he couldn't keep himself from screaming as they cut him deeper, tearing flesh and ripping vessels.

As with the previous night, there reached a point where his interrogators seemed to go beyond purposeful questioning and were simply visiting fury and vengeance on him instead. The air reeked with his blood; the room reverberated with his cries. At last, as the night wore on and a faint crack of dawn began to appear through the window, one man smashed him in the face. Samm felt it connect with his nose in a sickening crunch, and then mercifully, he blacked out.

 _The middle-aged lady had been staring at him for a while now, as the bus rolled along down the Interstate. Samm hadn't realised it at first, lost in thought as he was, but her prolonged gaze was becoming uncomfortable. He turned to meet her eyes, wondering what she wanted._

' _Are you one of_ them _?' she said in a quavering voice._

' _I beg your pardon?'_

' _A Partial,' her voice rose slightly, increasing in pitch with every word, 'are you a Partial?'_

 _Heads turned towards them. Samm briefly considered saying he was human, but the lie never made it to his lips. 'I am,' he told her._

 _The woman sprang away from him as the bus rounded a bend; its inertia caused her to swing into another passenger, who caught her and glared at Samm._

' _Get off the bus,' growled a man behind him. Samm held his hands up in alarm, whether for defence or a show of peace he wasn't even sure. The passengers on the bus were turning on him in unison now._

' _It's a Partial!'_

' _It pushed this lady!'_

 _A punch flew at him; Samm ducked it easily, and the man who'd thrown it smashed his fist into the window, shattering the glass. His blood splattered the seats._

 _The bus screeched to a stop._

' _Enough!' roared the driver. 'You—off!'_

 _Stung by the injustice, Samm stood his ground. 'I haven't done anything.'_

 _The humans were beyond reason, though. 'Filthy Partial!' More fists swung at him, boots kicked out towards him. He could avoid most of them by reflex, but the space was enclosed and several hits connected landed. There was no way to avoid it without fighting back and if he did, he could probably take down about half his attackers at once …_

 _Terror struck him—he'd heard of Partials who had retaliated to racist violence in self-defence and ended up convicted because of it. But he'd also heard stories of Partials beaten to death by mobs, their heightened strength overcome by sheer number._

 _Samm fled the bus. One of the passengers landed a square blow to the side of his head as he stumbled out the door, making him trip and land hard on the gravel road. The doors closed behind him and the bus trundled off._

 _He was bleeding, his palms were scraped where they'd broken his fall, and he was at least a hundred miles from home. He'd never get back before his shift, and there would be hell to pay then._

 _But there was nothing for it. His body and soul both stinging, Samm started walking._

Samm came to with a splutter. Something touched his head and he flinched, thinking it was about to begin again—he wished he'd stayed unconscious. But the touch was soft, gentle, almost a caress. He dragged his eyes open.

'Holy crap, what happened to you?' It was the girl, her hands cradling his head, her fingers applying light pressure against his sore cheeks.

His mouth was thick with a rusty twang. 'Blood,' he croaked, wincing. His whole head felt sore and stiff. The girl set his head back down gently. He could hear the rustle of her movements about the room, and then she was back, holding a cloth to his mouth. He spat gratefully into it.

'I can see you're bleeding, but why? What happened?'

Did she really not know? He cracked his neck, releasing the stiffness with a loud pop. 'They cut me.' His skin still felt slightly raw, chafing against cloth. _Cloth?_ He lifted his arm, surprised. They'd dressed him back in his original uniform. It was an astonishingly humane gesture, completely incongruent with the brutality and indignities he'd been subjected to.

The girl caught his arm and rolled up the sleeve. Her fingers traced the tender scars lightly.

'Who?' Her voice shook with anger, though Samm didn't think it was directed at him. 'Who was it? The guards? Doctors?'

He nodded vaguely. His mouth still felt disgusting; he ran his tongue over his teeth, trying to rid himself of the metallic taste.

'That's ridiculous.' She pulled away, her motions jerky and sharp with fury. It was amusing … almost endearing. Samm was fairly certain her indignation was on his behalf, at his ordeal at the hands of his enemies. _Her people._

When had she ceased to be the enemy?

'Do you have a name?' she asked, suddenly.

He stared at her in surprise, floored by the unexpected question.

'Why do you want to know?'

'Because I'm tired of calling you "Partial".'

Warmth bubbled up unexpectedly inside him. This was the strongest proof she'd given him that he wasn't just a thing to her. 'Samm,' he said, an olive branch in return.

She repeated his name uncertainly. 'I have to admit, I was expecting something more unusual.'

'It has two _M_ s,' he offered. It was the only difference from the regular name. He wasn't sure why she had expected him to be unique from the other Partials … unless she meant unusual from humans. Was 'Sam' a common human name as well?

'Why two _M_ s?'

No one had named him specifically; it had been on the rucksack, labelled 'Sam M.', given to him when he was two days fresh from the vats. 'I didn't realise the _M_ was for a last name,' he explained.

The girl nodded. 'Samm, I know you have no reason to help me, no reason to do anything I say, but I want you to understand that this is very important.'

He frowned, wary at her sudden seriousness.

'You guessed yesterday that RM is still a big concern for us, and you were right. Everything I'm doing here—everything we're all doing—is to find a way to cure it. That's why we were in Manhattan, because nothing we have left here on the island was giving us any answers. I don't know if that's important to you in any way, but it's incredibly important to me. I'd give up my life to find a cure.'

Did she really mean that? It seemed like a big sacrifice to make, for something that wasn't of direct use to her. She didn't need a cure herself; yet she professed to be willing to die in order to discover one.

The idea was mind-boggling. The other implication, though, was that she might be willing to consider something more drastic. If she thought the Partials could help, would she be willing to work with them in exchange?

'Now I know this sounds weird,' the girl continued, 'but I'm going to ask you a favour. Will you breathe into this?' She held up a rubber glove.

He raised an eyebrow. Was this still related to the cure somehow? It wasn't in his breath, he knew that much.

'I need you to inflate it. That will allow me to isolate your breath sample and study it in the medicomp.'

It sounded innocuous enough. And if he was going to contemplate co-operation, he might as well start here. If he was going to be working with her though, Samm wanted a handle for her, too.

'Tell me your name.'

'Why?'

He almost smiled at how she had unknowingly mirrored his response. 'Because I'm tired of calling you "human".'

She blinked, the corners of her mouth twitching, then said, 'My name is Kira.'

 _Kira_. 'Then yes, Kira,' said Samm, trying out the name. 'I will inflate your rubber glove.'

He drew a deep breath as she fitted the opening of the glove to his lips, and exhaled into it. 'Thank you,' she said, once she had sealed it off. Having retrieved what seemed to be her sample of interest for the day, she returned to her machines to run her tests. He watched her for a while, intrigued by the fervour in her analysis.

She was very different from the other humans, beyond the obvious physical distinctions. In hindsight, this shouldn't have come as a surprise. There were plenty of personality variations among Partials, even within the same models, and that was for a species that had been specifically designed. Humans were bound to be much less homogeneous.

There were many _ideological_ differences among Partials, too, as their split factions could attest to. Reasoning along the same lines, the humans probably exhibited these as well, and possibly to a greater extent. The threat of expiration had intensified the civil war among Partials. Samm wondered if the humans faced a similar splintering in their community, divided in their approach to dealing with RM.

He immediately felt certain that they were. Mkele had hinted at it last night. The human society was probably as fractured as his was, probably as terrified, too.

With so many similarities among them, the distinction between 'human' and 'Partial' no longer seemed terribly vast. He'd found that he could identify with their situation. Was the reverse possible?

Even if it was, what would that mean? And how did it relate to what he should do?

Samm's head spun as he tried to work it out. He wished for the presence of a superior, genetically planned to strategise in complicated scenarios. Ironically, he'd often chafed at the enforced choices of the military, caught between his nature to obey as a soldier and a desire to experience his own decisions. Now here he was, in a situation where he had to think for himself, and he was wishing for someone to tell him what his next move should be. _Be careful what you wish for indeed._

 _What would Heron do?_ he wondered, suddenly thinking of his … well, he supposed he could call her his friend. She wasn't his officer, for sure, in spite of her status at the top of the link hierarchy. The spy models all eschewed leadership, preferring to operate in aloof independence. Why Heron bothered with him was just one of the mysteries of Heron.

But she was the most resourceful person he knew, especially when it came to survival. No one was more ruthlessly determined. Heron would have searched for the best way to survive, though. She always did. She would have been dispassionately rational about it, too. Samm had always looked upon her indifference to how others treated her with a mixture of admiration and envy. Nothing discomfited Heron, she just thought things through logically to find the best solution.

Logically, he supposed it didn't matter what he did: they planned to kill him anyway in five days, so it was a matter of whether he died sooner or later. But what was it they used to say in the trenches? _Every day you're alive is another chance to make it to the next._

Samm laid out the facts he had again, starting from their point of similarity with the Partials: the humans were struggling to cure RM, but they were divided in their approach. The only reason he was here was because they believed—well, Kira, believed, and she had convinced her superiors—that he had the answers, whether in his body or his knowledge. The moment they extracted it from him, he would die. But in five days, when they didn't get the answers they were searching for, he would still die.

Unless they believed that his survival could benefit them.

 _Could_ he manage to convince them?

Not Mkele or the soldiers. They were already impatient with the allotted five days. Mkele had been clear enough about his disapproval of keeping Samm alive; if he had his way, Samm was sure this little experiment would be abruptly discontinued.

Start with Kira. If he couldn't get her to believe in his usefulness to her and her goals, he wouldn't have a hope with anyone else. But he must not forget that he was ultimately dealing with the decisions of generals, which meant he had to think like them. Kira had bought him five days with the hope of curing RM; her generals had wider concerns, as Mkele had hinted.

He would need first to establish two things: first, that the Partials were not a threat or danger to the humans, and next, that the Partial community as a whole might have the answers they were looking for. And not just the cure to RM, but a way to soothe their fractured society.

A tall order, considering that the Partials hadn't exactly managed to solve that problem themselves.

Samm wondered if Kira recognised that curing RM was only the beginning. He thought about how she'd spoken of laying down her life. It must mean more to her than just a cure—perhaps a magical solution that would unite her society. That was why she was so much more invested than her generals in this study. She didn't realise yet that curing RM was a band-aid.

Either way, none of the goals were going to be achieved by her studying a glove full of his breath under a microscope.

'You're not going to find what you're looking for,' he said.

Kira whirled around to glare at him. 'And how do you know what I'm looking for?'

'You're looking for a solution.'

'I'm looking for a cure.'

'The cure is only part of it. You're looking for a solution to your problems: rebels, plagues, political unrest, civil war. You're scared of everything, and to be fair, everything in your lives is pretty scary.' He thought of how their lives had been thrown into a frenzy since their first batch had expired a few years back, and it was quite easy to project the same feelings onto the human community. 'You're looking for a way to move past it, to bring your lives back together. But you're not going to find the answers simply by curing RM, and you know it.'

Kira strode away from him to the window, cursing under her breath. He could hear her struggling with it for a minute, getting louder as she failed to budge it. He read in her actions the desperation they both shared, for the futures of their respective species.

'We don't want you to die,' he said, his first peace offering.

'Then why did you kill us?'

'I told you, we didn't create RM.'

'What I found in your breath suggests otherwise.'

So she had found something. He doubted she fully understood; his breath was a complicated concoction of link data, which even their own scientists couldn't completely unpack. Whatever it was, it didn't matter; related or not, he needed to convince her that his people never had the _intent_ to kill hers. 'If we wanted you dead, you would be dead. That's not a threat, it's a fact.'

'Then what do you want from us? Why did you keep us alive? What are you planning? Is this why you were in Manhattan?'

He had to tread carefully now. She was his best chance for collaboration, for survival, but he wasn't certain enough that she would react. He felt like he could possibly trust what she said, but claims that she would die for a cure weren't necessarily tantamount to a willingness to consider working with Partials. 'You seem like you'd do anything to ensure humanity's survival. How far are you willing to go?'

'What are you talking about? What are you suggesting?'

How did he phrase the next part? She sounded ready to listen, which was good, but at the same time he felt a heightened awareness of the cameras watching and listening in. He wasn't sure he'd managed to convey a convincing sense of harmlessness. Moving on to his next point wouldn't be very effective if he hadn't hit the first well enough.

'No, you can't just say something like that and then clam up again.' Kira's face loomed over his. 'Why did you even start talking if you're not going to finish?'

She was hovering uncomfortably close above him. He looked away from the startling intensity of her gaze.

'Is this what you were talking about yesterday? That you can't tell us because you don't want to die? I've got news for you, Samm: You're going to die anyway.'

Whatever hope he'd had deflated, pricked by the harshness of her words. She was as committed to his eventual death as the other humans; he hadn't led her anywhere near considering an alternative.

'If you've got something to say, say it. You were in Manhattan for a reason; are you saying it had something to do with RM?' When he didn't answer, still trying to organise his thoughts, she stalked away to take it out on the window again. Her battering had a strange, muffled quality to it this time, almost like she was beating it from the outside. And then she moved away, rushing past his table without a second glance at him as she dashed out the door.

She was certainly dramatic, though Samm supposed he was becoming accustomed to it. It was even somewhat endearing. He reminded himself again that expressive behaviour was her only interactive tool. She was bound to be extravagant with it.

He waited for her to return, but minutes passed, possibly hours, and no one came, not even Dr. Skousen. Samm lay staring at the cameras, wondering if they were observing him now. He thought about his failed attempt at seeding the idea of his harmlessness. He'd gone about it wrong, starting from the perspective of RM. The disease was an intensifying factor, but the animosities between their species had existed long before it.

 _They hated us, even before they believed we loosed a plague on them. It was the very reason we rebelled._

How did he even begin to contend with that? Memories of unfair attacks lobbied at him since he'd first return from the Isolation War still haunted his dreams. He could barely remember a time when the Partials and humans hadn't been enemies. Was it even possible to overcome such a long, deep animosity?

You _have_.

Samm was startled by his own realisation. It was true … his own feelings about humans had evolved in the short time he'd been held, from bitter hatred to slow understanding. He still held anger and fear towards Mkele and the soldiers, but he could comprehend their motivations. And Kira was human, too. He couldn't recall the cruelty of her fellows without reliving the softness of her touch or the acceptance in her words. The two intertwined in his recollection, impossible to separate.

As if on cue, Kira returned just then. Their eyes locked once, and Samm felt a strange flush of heat in his face and looked away. After some time, she strode purposefully over to him and he expected her to continue questioning him, perhaps to demand he explain himself, but she only adjusted something at the base of his operating table and moved the entire contraption to a machine in the corner of the room. It hummed and whirred as it scanned him.

Unease crept up upon Samm. Kira hadn't explained her actions this time, and she was clearly studying him in earnest now. Did it mean she was less receptive to his words now, after his earlier suggestions? Samm's disappointment at his failure was sharp and bitter, tinged with a sense of loss. It hurt more than it should, the thought that he might have lost whatever goodwill that was developing between them.

'Tell me about your … pheromones,' she said, suddenly, without any preamble. Samm turned the word over in his head, trying to understand the command. _Pheromones …_ those were chemicals, weren't they?

'You have a highly developed system of chemical synthesizers and receptors; can you tell me about it?'

Samm felt a prick of alarm as he realised she must mean his data. That was what she'd been scanning in the machine. Did it have the ability to read it and relay information to the humans after all? He hadn't been careful with his thoughts since determining that the humans had no access to the link. If Kira had found a way, though …

She brought out something vaguely hand-shaped. Samm barely had time to register that it was the glove he'd blown up for her earlier, before she pricked it.

The sudden burst of link data, so close, so familiar, exploded over his senses: TRUST. CO-OPERATE. Even as he jerked away in surprise, its effects flowed into his parasympathetic nervous system instantly, priming him to relax.

To comply.

That was the link—communication and control mixed in one inescapable package.

Samm cursed. 'That's not fair.'

'What just happened?'

'You're using my own data against me.' The words spilled out of his mouth automatically. He fought to regain control. It wasn't too difficult; the data was his own, a command without hierarchical weight.

'What data? The pheromones? Is that what you call them? You just told me something you didn't want to tell me, didn't you? You've never done that—this was a slip. What did the pheromones do?'

From the way she was questioning him, it was clear she didn't know what information had passed. If she couldn't read his data, his secrets were safe. Samm kept his mouth clamped shut nevertheless, annoyed at the way she had managed to turn it on him, shocked him with his own emotions. Link commands were one thing filtered down from a Partial general. Samm wasn't about to allow a human to control him, not even one he had been feeling some connection with.

Anyway, she didn't seem to need his answer. She figured it out quickly—she was clearly intelligent—reasoning it out loud. 'You can standardise one person's emotional state across an entire group,' she concluded.

'You can't use it against me any more,' Samm warned her. 'I'm not breathing into your gloves.'

'I'm not trying to use it against you, I'm trying to understand it. What does it feel like?'

He wondered if he should reassess his opinion of her intelligence. 'What does hearing feel like?'

'Okay, that was a stupid question,' she said, backtracking. 'You're right, it doesn't feel like anything, it's just a part of who you are.'

It must be as intriguing to her as the humans' range of expression was to him. 'I'd forgotten that humans couldn't link,' he said, thinking of his initial difficulty in deciphering their behaviour. 'All this time I've been so confused, trying to figure out why you were all so melodramatic about everything. It's because you can't pick up each other's emotions from the link, so you have to broadcast them through voice inflection and body language. It's helpful, I'll admit, but it's kind of …' he searched for an appropriate adjective, '… histrionic.'

'Histrionic?' she repeated sceptically. 'If you depend on chemical triggers to tell people how you're feeling, that explains a lot about you, too. You don't display nearly enough emotion for human society; if we seem melodramatic to you, you seem downright deadpan to us.'

He supposed this was a fair assessment. She'd missed the extent of how the link worked, though. She wasn't lying when she said she hadn't intended to control him: she hadn't had a clue what pricking that glove would do.

'It's not just emotions; it lets us know if someone's in trouble, or hurt, or excited,' he explained. He elaborated about the battlefield applications – how it saved them shouting warnings that could be overheard and primed their sympathetic nervous system ahead of attack.

Kira lingered on the concept of data. 'Links and data—very technological words.'

A stray term she'd used the previous day popped into his head and Samm smiled. 'You called me a biological robot yesterday,' Samm reminded her. 'That's not entirely inaccurate.' Kira grinned at him, and he forgot for the moment that he was strapped to a table in enemy territory. He could have been home, having a normal conversation with a friend. 'I don't know how you people even function,' he joked. 'It's no wonder you lost the war.'

It was the wrong thing to say; the temperature in the room seemed to drop. Kira's smile faded and she looked away from him. Samm linked regret, but he was acutely aware that she wouldn't recognise it. They had different perspectives of the Partial War. He wondered if she'd ever heard the Partial side of the story. What would she think of it?

'I worked in a mine,' he told her. 'You created us to win the Isolation War, and we did, and then we came home and the US government gave us jobs, and mine was in a mine.' He could still remember the harsh conditions, the tedium, the disconnection he'd felt down there every day. 'I wasn't a slave, everything was legal and proper and … "humane".' It was what they'd called it when the Partials were paid wages. But he'd had no choice in the matter; no more ability to decide his own life than when he'd been commanded on a Chinese battlefield. How did he explain that in a way Kira, who clearly knew nothing about being controlled, would understand?

'I didn't like it,' he settled on saying. He painted for her a rough picture of his limited life before the rebellion, when no jobs were hiring Partials, no schools were accepting them, and no homes were available to them outside of their assigned slums.

'So you rebelled.'

'We hated you. _I_ hated you.' Samm remembered the intensity of their resentment, disseminated and shared through the link. How much of it had been collective? How much of it had been his own? He caught Kira's eye. The look in them, so close to tears, gave him a stab of anguish. 'But I didn't want genocide,' he said, returning to his earlier theme. 'None of us did.'

'Somebody did.' Kira looked away, and Samm felt guilty, realising all of a sudden that she must have lost people in the Break. She couldn't have been more than five years old, part of a generation of humans who would never know the old world. Disconnected and parentless … just like him.

'And you lost every connection to the past,' he said softly, wishing she could feel the empathy he was sending out. 'I know exactly how you feel.'

Kira turned on him vehemently. 'No, you don't! You say whatever you want, but don't you dare say that. We lost our world, we lost our future, we lost our families—'

'Your parents were taken from you,' Samm argued. 'We killed ours when we killed you.' Even if they hadn't intended for RM, he couldn't pretend the rebellion had been free of bloodshed. And culpable or not, they still shouldered the shame of RM. 'Whatever pain you feel, you don't have that guilt stacked on top of it.'

'Is that why you're telling me all this? Because you feel bad about killing us?'

Samm paused. Their conversation had progressed so organically that he'd almost forgotten why he'd initiated it. Yes, he wanted her to understand his side of the story, but there was more to it. He took in her wide-eyed expression and remembered her idealism and his need to make her see a wider picture.

'I'm telling you this,' he said finally, 'because you have to understand that the cure is not enough. The war was devastating, but the problems started long before that.'

Her eyes darkened. When she spoke, her tone was aggrieved. 'Don't tell me what I have to understand.'

The conversation ended; she moved him back to his original position in the centre of the room and retreated to her corner. Samm watched her intermittently for the rest of the day while he thought things through again.

He considered the history he'd related to Kira, and the events before and after that had shaped it. He'd been in the last batch of Partials created, a small regiment who'd seen barely a year of active service in China when the Isolation War ended. That was when he'd met Heron and wondered what it would be like to be independent like her. The end of the war had struck him as a good chance to explore life for himself.

Only it hadn't—he was no more free on American soil, between government assignments and the social fabric that constrained him just as effectively to an empty, meaningless existence. Twist and turns in official legislation had first promised better rights, then descended into worse marginalisation.

The rising rebellion had started with the top ranks, but it spread like wildfire even without needing the use of the link hierarchy. The early days of the revolution had been full of hope and promise, with grand speeches about how they would restore proper hierarchy and deliver freedom to the Partials from the human yoke.

Only it had all gone wrong. They'd subdued the humans, but just as they had intended to treat with them and establish their bold new society, RM had spread out of nowhere and redrawn the battle lines even more fiercely. The first splinters in the Partial command structure appeared as battle strategies morphed into attempts to contain the disease and spare the human population versus retaliation against the new wave of increasingly desperate counterattacks from the humans.

And then they were gone—99% of the population dead, the remaining survivors retreated to Long Island—leaving an empty world that the Partials had no clue how to run.

In the end, revolution hadn't led to a better life. Maybe things had changed in that the decisions handed down were made by Partials themselves, but ultimately it hadn't led to freedom or more choices on the individual scale. No, all they had gained was ten more years of war, this time among themselves, because war was all they knew. Even the more pacifist communities had never dropped their military structures. No Partials had an idea of how to construct a society of peace. Their response to expiration—a renewal of the civil wars, each faction believing they had the answer—only proved it.

Did the humans know any better, though, with their own impending unrest? Samm supposed they did have the better of the Partials, if it had taken a decade of struggling against extinction to divide the community. What had made them unite initially? Humans were so naturally independent, more so than Partials, which made it more surprising that they could work together. Something strong must have driven each one to believe in collaboration.

Something drew Samm's gaze back to Kira, still concentrated on her analysis. She was single-mindedly, stubbornly determined in her mission. Images of her flew through his head: arguing defiantly in the hearing, claiming passionately that she would sacrifice herself for the cure. She practically blazed with her purpose. And it was more than the altruism of a soldier ready to sacrifice herself for her platoon, because there was no command, no mission handed down from a higher authority. Every decision she'd made, she'd chosen for herself. RM inspired her. And perhaps that was what differentiated her from the rest of the humans—not her desire to cure the plague hanging over them, but the fact that she was still dedicated to the vision.

 _It inspired_ all _of them at the start._ _RM united them. They had to rally together to tackle the problem. But some of them will have given up by now … the way some of our factions accepted expiration._

He'd told Kira that the cure wasn't a solution to all their problems. While he could see that was true, he wondered if her view was, too. That it was possible to reunite a community around a common, achievable goal.

But he had no concrete cure to offer. Without one, she wouldn't be giving her people anything to rally around. _What about_ _redefining the purpose?_ He thought about the way the humans had fought back harder in the Partial War when driven by RM's deadly ticking clock. If they knew about expiration, would they realise that both species were on the same side, with extinction the real enemy they faced?

It couldn't be that easy. A colder, more dangerous thought surfaced: there was a simpler way to create a unifying purpose, one that had been evident in the Partial War within both sides.

A common enemy.

He'd never be able to pit countering an abstract enemy against the attractive goal of triumphing over one they could see and touch. And here he was, a real life enemy they could successfully display at the end of the five days, saying, 'Look, we managed to avenge ourselves upon one.'

If the humans knew about expiration, their leaders _would_ kill him, and the quicker the better to repair their society with a unifying display of defeat over the Partials.

Samm shut his eyes in frustration, deeper than ever in his dilemma. The more convinced he became that the two species needed each other, the more impossible it also seemed that a truce could be forged. His nightly interrogations were already cues that the humans were all too set in their views of him as a deadly enemy.

 _No, not all the humans._ His eyes flew open, landing on Kira. He no longer considered her as an enemy; was the feeling mutual? She was a visionary, feisty, determined, and stubborn. The way she spoke out of turn to her superiors, her willingness to break the rules for a cause she believed in … the wildest idea yet came to him. Could she trust him enough to work with him independently of the other humans?

The implications of what he was now considering were not lost on Samm. He would be counting on Kira to help him escape, to return to Greenwich with him and make a deal with his faction—an exchange, one cure for the other. Somehow he would need to communicate all this to her without alerting the humans on the other side of the cameras to his goal.

It was a seemingly insurmountable task, and yet it still seemed easier than convincing a whole community of hostile humans that he wasn't the real enemy.

Kira got up from her table. She looked sad and tired, and he presumed her analysis had not gone the way she'd hoped. She glanced at him hesitantly, and her expression held a full volume of things she wanted to convey. Yet all she said was, 'Good night, Samm.'

'Good night, Kira,' he told her, but she had already turned. He didn't know if she had heard. All the same, Samm felt a glimmer of hope in her greeting. It was a sign that she was still receptive to listening to him. He would just have to trust that he could get through to her tomorrow.

 _I've got three days left to believe in something. I may as well believe in this. I may as well believe in her._


	4. Choice

**Five Days**

a _Partials_ fanfiction by _shiiki_

* * *

CHAPTER FOUR

Choice

 _Day 3_

The man burst into the room, livid with rage. He was another uniformed soldier, and he came straight to Samm's table, swinging the rifle he carried at Samm. The end of it connected solidly with Samm's forehead.

'I watched my parents die in the plague, you evil scum.' The rifle smacked down on Samm's head again, making black spots erupt in his vision. 'They boiled alive from the inside.' Another blow. 'Do you know what that's like, you monster?' His voice cracked on the last word.

Quick footsteps announced the arrival of the man's companions—Samm's interrogators for the night, no doubt. He resigned himself to another violent night.

'Private Thornton,' said a voice sharply. 'Step away. You're overwrought.'

'It killed my parents!' yelled Thornton. 'And yours! It killed all of our families!'

'And we will deal with it.' Arms pulled Thornton away from Samm, revealing the face of Mkele behind him. 'You are out of line, Private. You have no clearance to be here.' Mkele gestured to two other soldiers who had followed him in. 'Report to Commander Weist with Private Thornton immediately.'

They saluted, and there was a slight scuffle as Thornton was escorted out of the room. Mkele glared at Samm. 'I told you we should have acted already. Already we're losing control.'

Dr. Skousen answered from the side of the room. He'd entered in the midst of the commotion, and was now sorting through Kira's files on the table. 'And you'll get your way soon enough.' He looked up, and a significant look passed between the two men. 'I take it you have no further questioning tonight?'

'Whatever secrets it has, it can keep them,' said Mkele. 'It doesn't matter any more.'

Dr. Skousen nodded. 'Well, I still intend to see what I can get out of this experiment.' He rose, and Samm saw the syringe in his hands. There was no escaping the sedation. It flowed quickly into his veins once the doctor injected him, and again, Samm was drifting into foggy unconsciousness.

 _He stumbled blindly out of the college building, both his mind and link shaken. The horror in the college interviewer's words, the instant rejection … they hadn't even known, not until he'd said, 'I'm a Partial.' And then they'd thrown him out without ceremony._

 _Distracted, he nearly ran over a toddler on the sidewalk. Samm apologised automatically, reaching to set the girl back on her feet. Her father grabbed his arm and Samm braced himself. But the man only steadied him and asked, 'Are you all right?'_

 _Of course—in the suit he'd bought for the interview, he looked like just another human on the street._

' _Yes,' he said shortly._

 _The little girl stared at him with solemn eyes. Unexpectedly, she reached for his hand. Samm took it, and the girl broke into a bright, gap-toothed smile._

 _The man patted his arm. 'Take care of yourself, son,' he said._

 _It was a colloquial use of the word, but still Samm's eyes sparked with tears, his emotions overwhelming intense._

 _No one had ever called him 'son' before._

 _They released Samm and continued on their way down the street, the man swinging his daughter up in his arms and onto his shoulders as they went. She turned back and waved at him before they disappeared around the corner of the block._

Samm awoke in the morning light, a trace of tears still dotting the corners of his eyes. His dreams had been so vivid these past few nights, calling up events from so many years past. Was it because of his proximity to humans again that he was dredging up the memories of his long-ago interactions with them?

This one was particularly poignant. It was perhaps his only lasting memory of a human family, and it gave him a sense of longing. Yesterday, he had spoken to Kira about the guilt of killing their parents, and it was true—humans _were_ their parents, but in a very general sense. Partials didn't have families the way humans understood them. Was it why their community fractured so quickly? They were created based on the human template, with the same emotions, but they lacked the connective experiences to accompany them. Even the Partials' drive to cure expiration had an inherent selfishness that the humans' motivation to cure RM lacked. As a Partial he was an entity into himself: disconnected from a family heritage, unable to perpetuate his genes. He'd never considered himself from this perspective before, and it left him with a dull ache, like there was something inside him that needed to be fixed.

He thought of the way Thornton had attacked him yesterday, crying vengeance for a long-dead family, and felt a sharp, empathic sorrow. Maybe they were all broken, in some way.

'Good morning.'

His heart leapt at the sound of Kira's voice. She entered with her arms full of books, but once she laid them down on her workspace, she came over to Samm to examine him.

'They beat you again,' she said sadly, running her fingers over the new bruises Thornton had left. His arms bore traces of new scars as well. He supposed Dr. Skousen had done it, though in retrospect it had been surprisingly decent of him to sedate Samm first.

Kira's eyes darted towards the cameras. 'They shouldn't be doing this to you,' she said softly. 'It's inhumane.'

Samm's heart warmed at her concern. 'I'm not sure that statement has any bearing on me,' he said, uncertain that the word 'humane' could even have any conclusive meaning, let alone one that encompassed himself.

'It doesn't matter if you're human or not. They're human, and that means they need to act like it.'

Samm wasn't sure what to say to this, the assertion that humanity lay in how you behaved, rather than how you were made. Kira bent over his legs—his heart did a strange dive as she rolled up the leg of his pants—and revealed several more incision sites that were already healing over.

'None of these wounds has ever gotten infected.' She paused, and he could see her turning this information over in her mind like an interesting puzzle. 'You should be okay,' she said at last, and left his side with a gentle pat on the arm. It reminded him of the man and his daughter in his dream.

Did Kira have memories like that? He guessed her to be in her late teens, which meant that she would have been quite a young child during the Break. How far back did humans remember? Was she haunted by memories of a father, or a mother she lost, or did she, like him, feel the invisible ache of a family heritage she should have but didn't?

He supposed he should just ask. _I did mean to talk to her at some point today, anyway._

'Did you have a mother?'

Kira turned to stare at him, with a quaint look of bemusement on her face. 'What?'

He repeated the question, but it seemed her issue wasn't that she hadn't heard, but that she found it astounding. 'I … of course I had a mother,' she said in puzzlement. 'Everyone has a mother.'

 _Everyone human._ 'We don't,' he reminded her.

'You know you're the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?' said Kira, a tad defensively.

Did it perhaps hurt her to remember someone she'd lost? 'I was only curious.'

'It's okay, I never really knew my mother.' Kira leaned forward in her chair, setting her elbows on her knees and placing her chin in her hands. 'I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.'

'Your father, then.' Samm tried, the image of the toddler and her father coming to mind again.

'Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.'

So she did share his lack of connection to parents. 'I've never had a father either.'

'Why are you so curious?' said Kira, wheeling herself over in her chair. 'You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you're obsessed with families?' Her hands lifted and spread out, palms facing upwards. 'What's going on?'

She was staring at him with open curiosity, wide and receptive. Samm took the chance. 'I've been doing something—a lot of thinking,' he amended. 'You're aware than we can't reproduce?'

'You were built that way,' said Kira. 'You were … well, you were intended to be weapons, not people.' Her mouth twisted ruefully. 'They didn't want self-replicating weapons.'

She'd summed it up better than he could: they were but the cold, calculative design of their creators. 'Yes, the Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure that created us.' Perfectly created, complete with a self-destruct button. Except they'd also come packaged with the emotions to be hurt by this discovery. 'But we do, and now all those old design parameters are—' He stopped himself before he ended up inadvertently revealed the issue of expiration. The cameras were still watching. Samm's heart pounded as he surveyed Kira, still listening wide-eyed to his words. He supposed it was now or never.

'Listen,' he said, launching into his plan, 'do you trust me?'

A moment of hesitation, then she shook her head. 'No.'

Not yet, then. Samm forged ahead. 'I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?'

'Ever?'

'If we worked together—if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?'

'I …' Kira's answer came slowly, deliberatively. 'I could trust you if you proved yourself trustworthy. I don't … I don't know that I distrust you on principle, if that's what you're asking. Not any more. But a lot of people do.'

He'd concluded as much yesterday. But out of curiosity, he asked, 'And what would it take to earn their trust?'

'Not having destroyed our world eleven years ago,' said Kira promptly. Then she considered, more seriously, 'Short of that … I don't know. Putting it back together.'

Samm turned this over in his head. She gave him more possibility to hope than he'd believed there to be. It reaffirmed his belief that she was open and willing to listen and consider him as an ally in her quest.

'Why are you telling me this?'

'Because the only hope, for either of us, is to help each other. To work together.'

'You've said that before.' He hadn't, exactly, but he'd meant to imply it. His message had got through after all.

'You've asked about our mission,' he said, recalling the question she had fallen back on each time their conversations had strolled down this path. Might as well give her an answer for it. 'That was it, Kira—we were coming here to try to make peace. To see if we could work together. You need our help to cure RM, but we need you just as much.'

'Why?'

He supposed the question was unavoidable. He couldn't share the secret of expiration, not until she'd taken more concrete steps to help him—and certainly not before those damnable cameras—but he could try and work around it. 'I can't tell you yet.'

'But you have to tell me—isn't that why you're here? If you came on a mission of peace, what were you going to say? "We need your help, but we can't say why?"'

Samm recalled his ruminations of the day before, the circuitous routes he'd taken to draw his conclusions that she was his best hope, and invented, 'We didn't know how much you still hated us. We thought perhaps we could persuade you with an offer to work together.' He watched her carefully, alert to any sign of doubt. The other humans would probably have dismissed this as a lie without blinking, but Kira continued to pay full attention. 'When I was captured and brought here, when I saw what's going on here … there was no way. But you, Kira—' he no longer had to fake truth here, 'you listen. More than that, you understand what's at stake.' He drew on an image of her own conviction to cure RM. 'That no price is too high to pay when it means the survival of your species.'

Kira clasped her hands together. 'So just tell me. Forget the cameras, forget whoever's listening on the other side, and tell me what's going on.'

'It's not just a matter of them not believing me,' said Samm, shaking his head. 'If they find out why I'm here—the instant they know the reason—I'm a dead man.'

It surprised him that Kira reacted uneasily to this, turning warily to the cameras. It wasn't the first time he'd mentioned the fact. 'It's okay,' he reassured her. 'They know I have a secret.'

She leaned back and stared at him, her arms folded across her chest. Samm waited patiently, watching her face go through its captivating array of expressions as she thought through all he had said.

Finally, she said, 'No, it's too perfect. It's like you're saying exactly what I want to hear. I don't believe you.'

Samm's hopes threatened to plummet again at her distrust, but he latched on to what she'd _also_ said. She wanted to believe. Her emotions were still warring with logic. She'd already conceded their similarities; he needed to remind her that they shared a desire to survive.

'Why would we want anything else?' Samm appealed to the first thing he'd ever known about Kira—her desire to cure RM. 'It's the most basic instinct of life—to outlive yourself. To build another generation that's going to see tomorrow.' He wondered if she would pick up on the subtle hint that if the Partials shared a similar obstacle to this goal.

'But you've never even known family,' Kira objected, reasoning in a completely different direction. 'You didn't have families, you didn't grow up, you have no idea what it's even like.'

 _Broken_ , thought Samm, shuddering slightly.

'What if creation is just a phantom instinct, held over from some lost shred of DNA?' Kira paused, her eyes suddenly distant, lost in a strand of thought. When she focused again, there was sorrow in her gaze. 'What do you think it says about us that we don't have any parents? I don't mean us, I don't mean kids, I mean no fathers at all—a whole society, two whole societies,' she amended, including the Partials, 'with no parents at all. What do you think that's done to us?'

A rush of emotion choked him and his eyes threatened to tear up. Thoughts of strategy, missions, and escape left him as he simply felt their shared underlying pain: the emptiness of two effectively orphaned species. What was the solution to that?

 _Only peace_. It was ironic that he'd started thinking about it as a means to an end, only to arrive now at a wider realisation that it was indeed the only goal worth achieving.

Samm stared into Kira's eyes for a long while, until she finally looked away, blinking hard.

A sudden buzz interrupted their moment, and a soldier ran in, his hands cupped protectively around a syringe. Samm's eyes snapped warily to him, but it was Kira the soldier ran to.

'The nurse said to give you this. She said you'd know what to do with it.'

'You're not allowed in here,' said Kira, standing such that she was between Samm and the soldier.

'She said it was an emergency,' said the soldier, holding out the syringe. Kira took it carefully, and the soldier peered around her. 'So that's him?'

Something about the soldier's words struck a chord with Samm. Kira didn't reply him, though, asking instead, 'What is it?'

'She said you'd know,' said the soldier. 'It's from the maternity ward.'

Kira burst into a frenzy of activity, evidently drawing some connection in her head. 'It's from a newborn! One of the mothers had her baby! Do you know which one?'

'She said you'd know what to do with it!' The soldier followed her to the counter, blocking Samm's view of what she was doing.

'I do know, calm down.' Kira rushed over to her medical scanner. 'This is uninfected blood, do you understand? The babies are born healthy and then the virus hits them, and we have only minutes, maybe less, before the virus morphs and attacks.' Samm listened in interest as she explained, effectively summarising her findings from her previous days' findings. So she'd managed to make some headway after all.

The machine ran its analysis. Samm couldn't see the result that popped up, but the soldier gasped, 'The baby's a Partial?'

 _What?!_ Shocked, Samm craned his neck to get a better view.

'No,' said Kira quickly, 'it means the object it found only partially matches the records in the database.'

 _Okay, false alarm_. Samm could almost appreciate the comical side of their exchange. He settled back against his table and studied the soldier. There was something about him that stood out …

 _Is that him?_ Samm put his finger on the nagging discrepancy at last. This soldier was the first person other than Kira to address him with a human pronoun. Samm eyed him with greater interest. It was the first sign Samm had that there might be other humans sharing Kira's potential for understanding. He was fairly young, possibly around Samm's own age. Near to Kira's, too. Was it their youth that gave them a greater openness? Or the fact that their age at the time of the Break coloured their perspectives differently from their elders?

All of a sudden, the soldier sprung into a defensive crouch. Samm tensed, recognising the position.

'What's going on—' Kira began. The soldier pulled her down roughly, such that only the tops of their heads remained in Samm's line of sight.

'Get down! There's someone here, someone sneaking around. They think it might be a jailbreak.'

Samm's heart raced at the unexpected intelligence. He'd been working all along on the assumption that his squad was dead, and that he'd been presumed dead along with them. Had he been wrong? He glanced at Kira and was suddenly alarmed. There were only two ways a jailbreak could end: in one version, its failure would likely mean execution for him and the end of whatever trust he'd built with Kira.

In the successful ending, Kira would likely be killed. She was hopelessly unprepared—unarmed … no, she'd realised that too and dashed to her pistol, but it wouldn't give her much defence against an organised attack.

Samm didn't even have time to marvel at how he'd automatically viewed the consequences of a successful jailbreak. An explosion shook the room, blowing the far wall into smithereens, throwing Kira and the soldier violently away from it. Samm's operating table flew clean off the floor and slammed into another wall, fortunately back first, giving him some protection from the crash. His limbs felt freer; the impact must have damaged the table. Samm struggled against them and felt them tear away from their fixings.

He was free.

Here was his chance. The blast had left a gaping hole in the wall, a clear passage out of his prison. Whatever the cause—Partial or human rebels—he could escape. He sensed no one nearby on the link, but the logical decision was still to get away, find cover, and make his way off the island while the humans were still distracted by the explosion.

'Help … me …'

There was a sizzle and a burst of heat as one of the machines, knocked over in the blast, began to burn. An awful stench, like charred flesh, hit Samm's nose.

The door, held fast by solid rubble, gave a rattle and inched open. He needed to go, _now_ , before the humans outside pushed through.

'It's the girl. Is anyone else alive in there?'

'You have to help me, my heart is stopping.' Kira's voice came faintly from under the burning machine.

Samm's thoughts were a whirlwind, full of contradictions. Hard cold survival against the knowledge that if he fled now, he'd leave Kira to die. The humans would never get to her in time.

Samm stopped thinking and acted.

The machine was incredibly heavy and his body was weakened from three days of captivity. Even so, he had enough strength to heave it slowly off Kira's legs. Sparks caught at his clothes, threatening to flame up, but he beat them off once he managed to shift the machine. Kira twitched feebly on the ground, coughing.

The door to the room shuddered under the efforts of the humans behind it. He could probably still run for it, but his window of opportunity was shrinking.

Instead, Samm knelt and scooped Kira up. Her legs were a mess of burns that he didn't even know how to begin treating. Her upper body fared better, but she was still covered in cuts and bruises. He couldn't ascertain what was the extent of her internal injuries.

'Thank you,' she whispered. Her arms circled around him and Samm's heart skipped a beat. 'I think he got away.'

She thought he'd run. He should have. He couldn't have. The world seemed to move in slow motion, then come to a stop, hinging on the sole fact that he was here, holding on to her.

'I'm right here, Kira.'

Her eyes fluttered open. 'You saved me.'

Soldiers battered the door down and surrounded them. 'Put her down!' they shouted. Everything came back into focus—the ruins of the room, the hole that was no longer a possibility for escape, angry soldiers and the barrels of their guns aimed at his face.

'He saved me,' gasped Kira.

'Put her down now!'

Samm set Kira down as gently as he could. The soldiers swarmed him, battering at him with their guns. Over the thuds of their beatings, he could hear Kira's weeping. He didn't know how long they continued their attack. His mind still felt fairly stunned. It was as though there were two Samms: one groaning in pain beneath the boots and rifle butts, and another trying separately to make sense of what was happening, what he had just done.

The choice he had just made.

 _You idiot_ , said a voice in his head, that reminded him vaguely of Heron, _you should have chosen survival. The choice is_ always _survival._ There wasn't much chance of that now… if they didn't kill him there and then on the spot, he didn't think they'd draw out his life much longer. And he'd brought it on himself, with his decision not to run.

Despite this knowledge, he felt a sense of giddy satisfaction settle over him. Whatever happened, whatever his fate now, it was because of his own actions. Not some mission from his commander, not some decision by another person.

 _I chose_.

He'd never felt more human.


	5. Escape

**Five Days**

a _Partials_ fanfiction by _shiiki_

* * *

CHAPTER FIVE

Escape

 _Day 4_

There were four humans in the room with him. Samm recognised them as the jurors from his hearing four days ago: two men, two women. Only the old Dr. Skousen was missing.

'Skousen will be along in a bit,' said the older of the women. She was the hard-faced once who had questioned him before, Samm thought. 'He's with Mkele … tying up the other loose end.'

The younger man turned quickly to look at her. 'Good god, Delarosa,' he said, 'you don't mean …'

Delarosa glared at him. 'No time to get squeamish now, Hobb.'

Hobb shook his head. 'No, I know, it's just …'

'If we'd killed it from the start,' said the other man, jerking his head at Samm, 'we wouldn't have needed to sacrifice our own people.'

'You agreed to this plan, too, Weist,' said Delarosa. 'And it's going to work.'

'Given how it's played out so far, you'd better hope so,' said Weist darkly. 'It was a gamble to begin with and it still is. We're in a delicate situation: we're stuck with the Partial, and no martyr. The Senate is following our lead for now, but if we don't get it all together soon, it won't last.'

'We don't need much longer. We just need a good way to deal with the Partial.'

Samm wondered what she meant by that. There was something strange about the whole situation—how they hadn't killed him yet, the implication that his manner of execution made a difference, and the reference to sacrificing their own people, as though Samm's continued existence was somehow a trade-off.

There was a sinister plan at work here. What part was he meant to play in it?

What part did _Kira_ play in all this? He thought uneasily of his last image of her, pleading for him from the ground as soldiers attacked him. Surely when they spoke of sacrificing one of their own, they didn't mean …

The door opened and two familiar faces marched in: Mkele and Dr. Skousen, both looking grim.

'It's done,' announced Mkele, with a half-glance at Skousen. 'Or will be, at any rate.'

'Within the hour, probably,' said Skousen heavily.

'And Walker?' demanded the last woman, speaking at last. 'We aren't going to be treated to any childish interruptions while we deal with this …' her eyes drifted over Samm, and she spat out her next words, ' _Partial_ here, are we?'

'Her leg was severely injured in the blast,' said Skousen. 'She'll be bedridden for several days. There's no chance of her wandering up here.'

Relief washed over Samm. They had to be referring to Kira. It sounded bad, but not fatal. Although he would never see her again, the idea that he had at least saved her gave him a strange comfort.

In spite of the fact that he was once again bound, this time to a chair, with thick chains that weighted heavily on his aching body, he still didn't regret doing it.

'Well,' said Delarosa briskly, 'it's time to go public.'

'Are you mad?' said Mkele, 'We've already—accurately—been accused of hiding something. Confirming it will trigger the revolution we're attempting to control.'

'Too many people know too much already for us to get rid of it in secret,' said Weist. 'She's right. If we reveal the information, we can control how it's presented.'

Samm's head ached, trying to follow their convoluted discussion. He was certain they were plotting something, but there was too much he was missing to put it into context. He couldn't think why they had so much to debate. They'd wanted him dead since the first day. He almost wished they would just get to it, instead of arguing incessantly over _how_.

'We have the girl, injured in her line of duty.' said Delarosa. 'A sympathetic victim, contrasted with her attempted killer.'

'We'll have to speak for her,' interjected the younger woman. 'She's a loose cannon.'

'Naturally. She's in no condition anyway to—'

The door banged open. The six humans stopped speaking abruptly, their heads swivelling over in shock. Kira stood there in the doorway, clutching the arm of a soldier and gripping a thin stand in her other hand.

'You told us she was too injured to move,' said Hobb accusingly.

'Turns out he's not actually a very good doctor.' Samm watched Kira inch forward. She moved gingerly, one leg dragging behind her—the doctor had probably not exaggerated her injuries. It was her fierce determination that he had underestimated.

Samm marvelled at her strength.

The soldier with Kira stopped her advancing. 'I'm sorry, senators, I didn't realise,' he said. 'I'll take her back.'

'No,' said Delarosa. 'She made it up here, the least we can do is listen to whatever she has to day.'

'We know exactly what she'll say,' objected the other woman. Delarosa ignored her and simply dismissed the soldier.

Kira's eyes raked over Samm, catching his gaze. He nodded to her, having only the human method of expression to rely on, but he was certain it failed to convey his admiration at her courage or the strange, tender feeling rising in him as he looked at her. Every step she took was clearly effortful and causing her pain, but she made it to a chair and said only, 'Sorry I'm late.'

'This meeting does not concern you,' said Weist. 'Your project has been terminated.'

Kira, Samm was unsurprised to see, was not taking any of it lying down. She argued and pleaded, finally asserting, 'If Samm dies, we all die, not today but inevitably, and there will be nothing we can do to stop it!' Her voice was hoarse but her conviction gave it power. The importance she attributed him was exaggerated, but in essence, it was the conclusion he'd reached over the past four days—that they needed each other—and had attempted to share with her. It gave him a sense of pride to hear her proclaiming it loudly and sincerely.

He'd been right to believe in her.

Kira didn't disappoint. She argued fiercely to continue her study, full of determination to win back the time she'd been allocated. The frail state of her body seemed of no concern to her, as she disregarded it as an impedance to her carrying out more work. When the senators countered her with an obstacle, she suggested an alternative.

And then she completely floored Samm, too.

'Then let him go free.'

Of all the arguments he might have expected her to make, he had not imagined she would campaign for his release. He'd hoped before that she might be an ally, a party to his escape—subversive, but secretive. Not in his wildest dreams had he expected her to make such a bold declaration of support for him.

If the situation hadn't been so serious, the emotion Samm felt at the way she painted him would probably have overcome him. As it was, he already felt like crying in gratitude at her words.

Predictably, though, the human leaders were having none of it.

'Do you honestly think that will do any good?'

'Of course she does, she's an idealist,' said Mkele.

Another senator had a more contemptuous term for it: 'She's a plague baby. She's developed an attachment to this thing, but she has no idea what Partials are really like.'

'And you do?' Kira shot back. 'You fought them eleven years ago—eleven years. Is it impossible to consider that something may have changed?

Idealist she might be—Samm couldn't really argue the point—she was probably the best hope they had now for peace. He watched her, a little entranced. She was like a force of nature.

'He's a soldier, not a spy,' said Kira. Their eyes met again. 'Samm has faced captivity and torture by people who want to see his entire race destroyed, and he's done it without crying, without complaining, without begging, without anything but strength and determination.'

Samm blinked, touched by her fervent praise. It felt as though he ought to have something to say to her in return—there didn't seem to be adequate words to convey how brightly she was shining in his eyes now … all the same, he realised he needed to step in. Kira had given him an opening, and if there was ever any point that he had a chance to convince the humans to work with him, it was now. There was only so much Kira could do to speak for him; he had to support her argument, too.

He rose as much as the chains allowed. Throwing out his voice as confidently as he could, he said, 'I'm on a mission of peace. My squad was in Manhattan because we were coming here, to talk to you. We came to offer a truce.'

They would know this much already if they had been listening to his previous conversations with Kira. It was perhaps unsurprising that they didn't believe him, especially since he _was_ fabricating this part. Nevertheless, he forged ahead, injecting as much sincerity as he could into his voice. _He_ believed in and supported a truce now; that gave it some honesty.

'It's the truth. We need your help.'

Samm felt Kira's eyes burn into him, and staring back at her, he remembered her insistence on an explanation. He supposed he really had no reason to hide anything any more, given the circumstances. All his previous plans were already in tatters. And there was Kira, who'd just gone up against her own leaders and defended his morals and trustworthiness. Kira deserved to know.

He faced the room of humans and said, 'We're dying.'

There was dead silence in the room as seven pairs of eyes locked on him, their mouths round 'o's as he explained about their sterility and the impact of death on their species.

Dr. Skousen reacted first. 'You're dying?' he said uncertainly. 'All of you?'

'We discovered ParaGen designed us with an expiration date,' Samm explained. 'At twenty years, the process that halts our aging reverses, and we shrivel and die within weeks, sometimes days.' This part of the explanation was acutely uncomfortable. 'It's not accelerated aging. It's decay. We rot alive.'

'They're dying,' marvelled the younger female senator. She did the math rapidly, coming up with the last two years Samm had to live—or would have, if he managed to make it out of here. 'And then they'll be gone forever.'

'Everyone will be gone forever,' Samm said. The senators' responses were a mixed bag, with a stunning range of expressions evident in their faces. None of them seemed to have grasped the point. 'Both of our species are going extinct,' he elaborated. 'Every sapient life form on the planet is going to die.'

'Our shelf life is longer than yours,' said Delarosa, her lips curling up into a grin. 'I think we'll take our chances on our own.' She wasn't accepting his plea for interdependence.

'That's what I've been trying to tell you,' said Kira, backing Samm up. 'Without them there is no cure. We have to work together.'

Samm's gratitude linked out to her, though he knew she couldn't receive it. ''You can have babies, but they did of RM,' he told the senators. 'We're completely immune, but we can't reproduce. Don't you see? We need each other. Neither species can beat this alone.'

Hobb finally stopped gaping at Samm open-mouthed. His eyes were lighting up with excitement. 'Think what this will do for morale! Once the people hear this, they'll … they'll declare it a holiday—a new Rebuilding Day!'

'What is wrong with you people?' Kira's voice shook with tears. 'He thought you'd kill him when you heard his secret, but it's worse.'

'We were always going to destroy it—that was never in question.' In Mkele's matter-of-fact statement, Samm heard the finality of a decision.

It hadn't worked. He'd thrown everything on the line, but they hadn't accepted his suggestion that there was another way besides war for their peoples. _Well, there was really nothing more I could do._

The senators were all in consensus now, reacting as Samm had imagined two days back. Rather than accept extinction as a threat common to both species, they latched on the easier solution of unifying their society against a less abstract enemy. Hobb was more animated than ever as he detailed the plan, not seeming to care that Kira and Samm were privy to it.

'Be careful, what are you telling her?' warned Delarosa.

'She can help,' said Hobb confidently, turning to Kira. 'You're an idealist, you want to save people—we want to give you that opportunity.'

Samm felt cold inside as Hobb sold their idea to Kira, bit by bit. It was one thing knowing that he was going to die. The possibility that they might convince Kira to be a party to it was excruciating. She was vehemently opposed to idea the moment Hobb laid it out, but they expanded it persuasively. Even Samm could see the logical necessity. Tactically, it was compelling.

Morally, emotionally … well, they'd never seen him as a fellow sentient being to begin with, had they? The old bitterness flared up, but Samm pushed it aside, concentrating on Kira. Would they sway her? He held his breath as Hobb proposed a role for her as the brave young face of their lies.

'This is evil,' said Kira, to Samm's relief. 'You're asking me to lie to everyone I know. You're asking me to be a part of his murder.'

'The wolves are hungry. We can kill ourselves fighting them, or we can throw them a body. The death of one Partial is the cheapest price for peace we could ever hope to pay.'

Something beneath the worthlessness that they viewed his life nudged at Samm's mind, but he couldn't think about it now. Kira was gazing at him with a burning intensity.

 _Thank you,_ he thought, though she couldn't possibly sense him. _Thank you for valuing me._

'It's time for you to choose,' said Delarosa.

Kira finally tore her eyes away and turned to the senators. And at last, she accepted his fate. 'There's nothing I can do to stop you.'

'You'll do it?'

'No, I won't. I can't keep fighting you—look at me, I can barely stand up—but that doesn't mean I'm going to sell him out to help you and lie to my friends.' Her voice cracked on the last word. 'Do whatever you have to do and be done with it. I won't stop you.' She turned away. 'And get one of your goons out there to carry me back downstairs. I can barely move any more.'

Samm watched her leave, weak and resigned, the fight blown out of her. He didn't blame her. She'd made a valiant effort—a greater one than he'd expected—but in the end, neither of them could overcome the years of deep-seated hate.

It was over for him now. Guards wrestled Samm into a small, unlit room, tightening his chains so that even the limited range of motion he'd been afforded during the senators' discussion was curtailed. They left him in the dark to contemplate the remaining hours of his life.

How would they do it? Publicly, he knew, and probably with some fanfare. He comforted himself with the thought that most likely it would be quick. A bullet to the brain, not unlike on the battlefield. Though to sit knowing it was coming was a very different sensation from the distractions that fighting afforded him. When you were killed in action, you rarely had time to think about it first.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been there when beyond his door, he heard the unmistakable cracking sound of bullets firing, accompanied by muffled yells and pounding footsteps. The slit of light peeking through from the bottom of the door wavered as shadows passed over it. Curious, Samm listened hard. Voices shouting. The rumble of indistinct conversation. An enraged yell came through, loudly and clearly: 'I don't want to save us both! I want to save my child and murder every Partial on Earth!'

And then Samm's heart leapt as someone shouted in reply, 'Saving your child is why we're here!'

It sounded like Kira. He couldn't make out the rest of the conversation, but it did sound as though she was holding one side of it. He hardly dared hope.

The door rattled. The knob turned and bright light filled Samm's eyes, momentarily blinding him. His pupils adjusted to reveal Kira standing before him with a set of keys.

'You look like hell,' she said.

She was one to talk—she was bruised and battered-looking herself. The last he'd seen her, she had been at the point of collapse, fighting to stay upright. He wasn't sure what she'd done to be standing now, let alone having fought through his guards to get to him. What a pair they must make.

'I'm fine,' he told her, more concerned about her state. He had an advanced healing system that she didn't.

Kira flipped through her keys, trying them in the locks on his manacles.

'You didn't have to save me,' Samm said, still marvelling at how she had, against all odds, showed up for him again.

'You didn't have to save me,' she replied. The last chain fell away and she was close, so very close. He could feel her breath, quick and uneven, against his face. If she could link, they would have been drowned in each other's data.

'Thank you,' she whispered.

And then she was turning to the door. Samm followed her, the urgency of their situation settling in. Kira had released him, but the building couldn't be this unguarded. Her jailbreak wasn't done.

He assessed the long hall before him quickly. Bodies scattered the floor, the result of the fight he'd heard earlier. A man Samm vaguely recognised was forcing several guards into Samm's prison, one of them spitting in fury as he crossed the doorway. One of Kira's compatriots from the hearing? The military officer, he thought, the one that had been stripped of his rank.

There was another man kneeling on the ground several feet away, bandaging a fallen soldier. This one Samm hadn't seen before; however Kira acted as though both men were allies. She locked every incapacitated guard in Samm's prison.

Someone burst through the door at the far end of the hall; both Kira and her military friend spun round with their weapons, but lowered them immediately. Another ally, thought Samm, taking in the unfamiliar girl that entered. They were all young, only teenagers. _Like Kira._

He didn't have time to consider this, though. 'We have to get out of here _now_ ,' said the new girl. 'The soldiers gave up on the decoy room and fell back to guard the maternity ward, so the mob's searching the whole building for this thing. It's only a matter of time before they make it up here.'

Samm allowed himself a brief moment of bitter satisfaction— _seems the senators' plans didn't go quite so well—_ and then he focused on the situation at hand. They needed weapons. _He_ needed one; Kira and her friend were already armed.

'Give me one of their guns,' said Samm, indicating the fallen guards.

'Do we trust him with a gun?'

'We're a long way past that,' said the girl. She passed him a rifle and Samm checked it quickly. Loaded, primed … _good_. The soldiers had left packs of ammo scattered on the floor. Samm retrieved as many as he could carry.

'How do we get out?'

'There's a back service stairwell in the north wing,' said the last man, the medic. 'It's locked on all floors, so no one will be in it, but we could shoot the lock.'

'And so could the mob,' said Samm, noticing the flaw in the plan immediately. He wasn't the only one. The military man voiced the exact same opinion at the same time. Samm glanced at him appreciatively. He knew this game.

'The elevator shaft, then,' said Kira. 'There's a ladder that runs down to the ground level.' Her eyes flickered to the medic. 'We used to play around in there when Marcus and I worked custodial during school. We can take that to the basement and look for the service door out the back.'

For all her courage and intelligence, Kira clearly lacked experience in battle and ambush situations. 'That could be dangerous,' said Samm. 'With a mob searching the building, the elevators will likely be running.'

Marcus made a noise of incredulity. 'Now I really want to visit Partialville,' he said. 'You guys have enough juice to run elevators?'

He stood corrected. Samm reminded himself that the humans would have a better working knowledge of this place. 'Unused elevator shaft it is, then.'

He let the others lead the way down the corridors and through the twist and turns of the floor until they arrived at the elevator shaft. They must be on a high floor; it was pitch black looking down. Kira hesitated, then lowered herself for the climb. Samm followed after, strongly reminded of recon missions on the continent. He reached out automatically with the link, years of training kicking in.

'Where do we get out?' asked the girl he didn't know.

'At the bottom,' said Kira. She described the layout of the basement, establishing a possible escape route. 'We're not likely to see anybody.'

A mere probability of being unseen wasn't the best plan. 'And if we do?' Samm asked.

No one replied him.

At the base of the shaft, it was dark, but the noise of angry mob-members travelled through the walls. Samm checked his rifle as Kira led them through the halls, carefully concealing the beam of her flashlight to the barest glow. Samm's link was silent, revealing no one close. They reached an intersection and he heard a movement close by—too close. He registered the humans' presence and realised his mistake a split second before Kira shone the full beam of light on six wide-eyed faces.

Samm didn't stop to think. He whirled into action, instinct taking over. The first man was easy—a blow to the temple took care of him, while his foot connected simultaneously with another's knee. Samm stuck to physical blows; it probably wouldn't help to shoot anyone, and anyway, no of the humans were any match for his skill and training. He had them unconscious on the ground within seconds.

'Holy …' The ex-officer stared as though seeing Samm for the first time. His rifle swung round to point at Samm's face. 'What did we let out?'

'None of them are dead,' said Samm. He glanced at his own rifle butt, dripping red in the glow of Kira's flashlight. 'The blood is from the third one's nose.' He eyed the fallen soldiers, their guns scattered around them. No sense in wasting weapons. Samm gathered them quickly and filled his pockets.

'What just happened?' said Kira, sounding a little lost.

 _None of them really know how to fight like us,_ thought Samm. He supposed that meant he was best-placed to take the lead, though he would have to remember to rely on his other senses. 'I'm not used to humans,' he explained. His mistake had been in falling back on the link, as he'd been trained to do. Still, he'd salvaged the situation. 'I think it worked out, though, since we didn't have to shoot anyone.'

'Well, thanks for not shooting anyone, I guess,' said Marcus, a little shakily. 'My contribution was to somehow refrain from peeing myself.' Samm looked at him oddly, not sure what to make of his flippant comment. 'You can thank me later.'

He decided to ignore it. There would be time enough to figure out his companions if they got out of here. Already he could hear more movement, getting closer. 'We need to go. There are at least two more groups down here, and maybe more that I can't hear.'

'Okay,' said Kira. 'Just don't do that to any civilians.'

'Yes, ma'am,' he said, and followed her along.

Kira led them safely out of the building without any more incidents. They emerged into the night, the first time in five days that Samm had been out in the open. The cool breeze tickled his face and he felt a renewed gratitude towards Kira and her friends. Twenty minutes ago, he'd been sure he'd be dead within the hour, and now …

Here he was, working together with a group of humans, part of the first inter-species alliance in decades.

 _It's possible._ Kira _made it possible._

'Move out,' said Kira.

Samm smiled and followed her into the night.


End file.
